LEAVE AUTHOR ALONE!

Kill the author? We can't kill the author! Without the author there's no book! And without books I wouldn't even be reading about people talking about the author!
But really, can we kill the author? The idea scares, and not just because I'm a writer. You can't say writing is entirely subject to the author. If I write "then the purple elephant ate some vegetables" you can't reasonably decide that it wasn't an elephant at all, it was actually a walrus and it wasn't purple because perhaps I'm colorblind and it was most likely blue, and what's all this "then" business? I've decided that narrator is a time-traveler and technically this all happened before. You might decide all that, but is it right? I don't think so. Yes, to a certain degree you do fill in gaps and interpret things certain ways. This is how books work and why the book is nearly always better than the movie, because we make it our ideal. If something is "beautiful" in a book then we give it our own personal definition of beauty. However, if an item was described as "purple" then I believe one should just agree with the author because it's their damn story.
The Barthes articles raises the criticism of an author that states that they're just re-arranging words that already exist. Well... yeah, that's what writing is. It's an art form. You follow certain guidelines of that genre, and the guidelines of writing is to use words people will actually understand. It's not scat. Does the fact that the author did not create the words take about from their authorship? I don't think so. Do all painters invent their paints? Do woodcarvers have to breed their own unique species of trees? Of course now I'm treading of the tricky ground of how much individual meaning language actually allows. But I don't think you can just rule out that the author is creating something that they, as an individual, are expressing. Yes, you can make an argument that language limits them, but I believe an individuality exists in this.
Okay, now we're entered the dangerous territory of who the author or even the "self" is. Man this is hard. Everywhere you turn there's someone ready to say "no". I honestly feel a little under pressure at the moment. I want to make my point, but I have to prove a whole bunch of theories wrong. Oh well, I'm just going to press onward.
Killing the author really scares me, because we're killing the author by giving authority to the reader, so we're saying the author isn't giving the text its meaning. Well I don't like that at all! Not one bit! I like certain authors a whole lot and enjoy their body of work and looking forward to what they're going to write next. I don't look forward to projecting myself into their works, I look forward to seeing what they're going to give me.
I've said it before on this blog and I'll say it again: MANY things factor into an author's writing. What if they're characters are based on other people? Well yes, it's their interpretation of that particular person, but I don't think you can rule out the original person entirely. I really don't want to kill the author. The author is my friend. Can we please keep the author? I promise to feed it and take it for walks every day, honest.
PART 2 COMING SOON! (Hey, she said we could do this as 2 entries.)