|
Nye Hill's Nyethologies and The Death of the Author
Nye Hill (famed for his 'Nyehillism' column) claims to have interviewed JookBoxFury author Kevern Stafford. Well, 'interviews' is a bit strong - Nye doesn't really go in for that sort of thing. Also, he's not great on meeting deadlines, he's promised to e-mail the interview through asap but says that a guy called Ray Mitchell has been messing about with his laptop and he thinks he's lost the transcript.
In the meantime, Nye sent us this from the introduction to his forthcoming book, Nyethologies – Mythologies of Rock and Pop
He Kissed Me and It Felt Like a Hit!
Do I know more than you? And if so, are you wrong? Or could it be that understanding has stripped us away from meaning because the work of art doesn’t make us laugh or cry any more. The emotion has gone. As Roland Barthes says of mythology, once we have decoded the myth, we must stand apart from the society that accepts the myth. We have become cold-eyed voyeurs at someone else’s party – well, it’s my party and I’ll be a cold-eyed voyeur if I want to.
Take one of the greats of artistic creation – take the roof of the Sistene Chapel, take Virginia Plain, take Beethoven, Bach or Bauhaus, take Heartbeat Drumbeat or JookBoxFury… take them all and I’ll tell you what they mean. They mean nothing. All it means when I tell you what they mean is that I’m laying a claim on understanding to make me look big. As Barthes says in The Death of the Author, “When the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ - victory to the critic.”
The significance of the death of the author is to liberate the text, because “once the author is removed the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” As text is composed from a multiplicity of meanings, textual and contextual, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” So meaning is found in the reader, not the author, and that reader is me, and/or you, and/or every other reader. The liberation that is achieved has a greater significance than to open the interpretation of the text, because by refusing to assign an ultimate meaning the liberation is an “anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases - reason, science, law.” To allow this freedom, through the birth of the reader, it “must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
The Author said, “Now, hold on a minute…”
|
