Reader killed the Literary Star

As with just about everything on the planet, I have very mixed feelings about this whole 'death of the author' thing.

I have always admired the artist that chooses to disclose nothing of their works' meaning. Leonard Cohen, for example, will rarely speak about intended meanings of his songs. When he does, his explanations are minimalistic and deliberately vague. We are barely given a context. The mystery of the art's 'true' meaning is still intact, and we can bend and shape and morph of it into whatever our lens for looking at the world desires.

It would be somewhat naive to believe that a writer, or any artist for that matter, could effectively convey something exactly as they see it, and I think that is along the lines of what Barthes is trying to say. Language does not have the benefit of holding the same unified meaning between any two people, because we all experience language differently. When I mention the name Daniel Johnston, I have a very fixed notion of who he was and what he created. To most people, that name is meaningless, but my knowledge of him, in many ways, has shaped the way I view the world. Of the relatively few people who are familiar with him, many are probably annoyed or put off by his 'art'. Clearly, they don't see what I see, or rather hear what I hear (he is a musician, for those who do not know). Or maybe they do, and that is their reason for NOT liking him. Maybe they feel just as passionate about his music as I do, but their reason for appreciating it is completely different from mine. We can both share the opinion that he makes 'good' music, but may take totally different roads in getting to that conclusion, so what may seem like a shared vision is actually quite different in that we are appreciating two different aspects of the same thing (or person, Danny was a person and he don't rapp).

So even the simplest ideas, when applied to language, become very confusing and varied in meaning. The simple notion of what makes art 'good' is questionable, so how the hell are we going to have a unified understanding of the intention the artist intended. How is it possible, or even reasonable, to place the author's voice over everyone else, when his intentions are questionable? I think by killing the author, and maybe Barthes doesn't ever really hint at this, but this is simply what I'd like to take from it, we are acknowledging that no voice reigns over another. We kill the author because we know that our world is subjective, and the presumption that we can make sense of the author and find a way, through his/her text, to experience the world exactly the way they do is to be limiting (to the readers and the author himself) and unrealistic.

Even so, killing might be going slightly overboard, lets just put him in a dark room for awhile, just until we've come to terms with ourselves.