Minor Tirade against a Lit Theorist

Ronald Barthes wrote an essay entitled the "death of the author" and I'm mildly peeved by his short sighted focus and i realize that it is a dangerous part of lit theory, one takes ones argument by the balls and argues for it with the blind pretensions of a philosopher on a linguistic ego trip but the closed mindedness of said author irritates.

He argues that the Author has no control over his writing, he is merely "pulling from his dictionary" at random and his actions are in fact the murdering of self via writing because you can't exist in the text any longer it is a moment in time and, apparently, the moment stops belonging to the author once he is finished.

He claims that to remove the Author is to take meaning and interpretation out of the text and doing so is "an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostasis--reason, science, law." does that feel like a leap to anyone else? to refuse to allow there to be meaning is to refuse God? please, i know we authors tend to have egos but I don't think anyone attributes a piece of literature to divinity short of religious doctrines like the Bible, Talmud, Koran etc... and refusing to give meaning to the bible doesn't exactly refuse the notion of God it can simply mean you don't feel something as complex as God can be in a book, etc, it doesn't require atheism... but regardless it hardly refutes God to deny a novel complex meaning.

This next quote i can agree with sort of, "The reader is the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination"

I'll give him that the reader plays a vital role and that without the reader the Author's acts are moot. however he goes further to say "we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author"

So, I get the "metaphor" the author relinquishes control and the reader takes it up etc, but to assume that the author no longer exists within a text is foolish, he is more than a dictionary. Sure, if I handed webster to you i'll deny the required role of the author but one can't take away the solid and glaring problem with this particular argument. The author wrote something specific. its not like he handed you a jumble of words in a jar and said "play with those sonny, see what you think" he gave you a specific text with specific word order and purpose and though the reader is free to interpret as he sees fit he is still limited by the text before him. If you give him a text of Romeo and Juliet yes he has a lot to go on but he's probably not going to be able to see the history of the Congo or the Declaration of Independence therein, he is limited. It is not something wholly created by the reader, it is something given to the reader that exists in two truths, two consciousness', the combination of two minds in one moment, the writer's words in the reader's mind. you cannot have one without the other. To remove the author from the text is to have air, it is a foolish enterprise and I am annoyed by the short-sighted argument herein.

Minor Tirade Complete...