Authors and Audiences

An author really never dies. If anything, a text is a series of observations frozen in it's own time and frozen in it's own context. With a simple perspective change from common-courtesy constructive-criticism (which every author has to adapt to), the author responds to stimuli from the audience and changes the nature of his work, whether through revision or a reinvention. Calling an author dead just because the audience read his/her work once seems to me like a typical English-major abstracting hyperbole.

For instance, if a well known author writes a children's book involving a serial killer clown and the book gets shut down by an editor before reaching a major audience, did the author die at any point of that process? There are still words written on the paper and there's still technically an audience of one with the editor, but nobody "died" in that scenario. Unless you count having one horrible book being read by one editor as dying, then all that happened was a precursor to revision so the book will be better received. Even works of art are liable to be judged against their Plato-esque perfect potential form.

So, the question that I'm perplexed about, really, is "How does revision tie into the idea of author-death?" Obviously an author will respond to criticism if it's presented well and is rational, and obviously an author's writing is a personal endeavor in the sense that the right words, thoughts, idioms, points, and counterpoints were all formulated in one brain. What this means is that nobody dies in the process. During the writing process an author will be thinking of the audience but only a shill and sell-out would write for the sole purpose of mass-appeal. An author has to put a part of his soul into his work or the words on the page will be inauthentic and reeking with formulation. While responding to criticism, the author can make changes to his work to adapt to his predicted audience as a sort of compromise between sender and recipient. Nobody's dying, but there's still fighting going on.

Ong said that writing is based off of orality on page 9, and that's probably true. Yet, writing is a time capsule of words accessible every time an author's work is read. There is no instantaneous mistakes to be made in writing the way there is with oral language. In written language there are no Freudian slips, no tongue twisting tongue twisters, and all because of time and the possibility of revision letting authors have the time and authority to craft a better, more developed product than if they were improvising verbally.

Unlike Barthes on page 845, I don't think any author dies, ever. Writing is like an absentee opinion or observation. In the most crude example I can think up, the graffiti spray painter is not there when you read "Down with the system! -Carl", but you understand that there at least was a Carl and that he had these particular thoughts about the system at one point or another. I believe that in a similar mechanism as in Foucault's author function, if that graffiti somehow escapes a painting over for 5,000 years, the same observation could be made about Carl, bringing him back to life. In writing, there is no death like in other technologies, especially with the internet.