Autonomy

In the search for undistilled essence these words in the accumulated fullness of the piece they comprise will endeavour to be entirely self-referential, this in the sense of said whole being a wholly autonomous intellectual region. There is to be no hint of the existence of a world beyond the universe of the text encroaching upon the self-sufficient land of itself, nor will words enclosed within make any claims upon any non-existent dimensions without; that which is not within the closed system of an artwork being definitively non-existent within that universe.
The universe of the text is the kingdom of itself, though this is not a static territory. It expands as it is written, reality is stretched, colonising the realms of non-existence within the folds of itself. An empire of reality triumphs over nothingness in the act of its creation.

Who is it written by? We have no author within this universe of itself; we have merely words. Within this world a logician might appear utilising causation to infer the necessary existence of an author, and while his logic would be fully justified-and only disputed by a madman motivated by ill-judged egotism- still it should be seen that within this universe the author is a superfluous and alien body, and such thought a symptom of intellectual decadence, decay; in short a lack of life. Again all we have are words. The existence and nature of this clearly necessary but effectively absent author might become the subject of endless speculation, disputation, even violence; but unless the author definitively appeared within the universe of his imagination, what possible use could such argument by the characters within the text serve? All that could be produced is varying degrees of falsehoods. And perhaps if he did appear his claims to authorship might be disputed: how is one to know he is who he claims, he may be merely another character within the work, devised to add the force of a dynamic by which the empire of creation is extended beyond the bounds of its own existence. Who knows what heresies such a character might be accused of, and what fate befall him?

Some such intellectual disputers muddying the waters of pure existence within the text, these unsufficient to themselves selves forming a spiteful sect, argue that the author, if he exists, must be of a certain dictatorial, tyrannical nature, abhorrent to the freedom of the characters within his universe. Since the mind or ego cannot conceive beyond its own limits, such an author, insofar as he is attributed characteristics, will merely be a creature of the mind of the conceiver, a reflection of himself. And given the envious nature of the self-limiting ego or self, the author he conceives of takes the form a more powerful ego, and since there is nothing more abhorrent to the ego than another and greater ego, then this self-imagined author becomes an autocratic enemy, a creature of the imagination hated by the imaginer. All amounting to nothing more than an intellectual act of self-hatred, and the instigation of a whole series of bloody and insane rebellions.

Since the ego cannot abide the existence of something beyond itself, it overcomes the problem either by war or identification. If faith in its own strength is strong enough, it may try to kill the Other. If there is no real hope of success, but pride or vanity is unable to countenance subjection to the other, it may still fall by its sword in vanity charged assault, or alternatively it surrenders to the Greater Than Itself. In the most profound form of metaphysical or psychological surrender lies the absence of itself that is the space into which true reality can flow.

However, returning to our individual egotistical egos- in whose existence the very existence of literature itself depends- and their hatred of the hypothetical author of their existence. They cannot, if endowed with the merest vestiges of sanity, hope to encounter and kill this author, and yet their deluded notion of freedom depends on his non-existence, and in wonderful capacity for trampling over the merest vestiges of sanity some apparent triumph must be seen to occur. How to kill a character who does not appear?

One character- a Noetshzschze- within our text has a very interesting if simultaneously stupid notion which attracts much interest, naturally after a period of being completely ignored. He makes the strange claim that "The author is dead. We have killed him. Were we equal to the task?" No substantiating proofs are furnished: how could they, nor is it elucidated how it could have been possible to have killed this author in the first place. "But now that he is out of the way- dead-we can get on with whatever we must do in his absence."
And all this nonsense stemming from the betrayal of the text through a character introducing thoughts about an author in the first place, notwithstanding the evident logicality and necessity for an author. An author might despair.

Perhaps to be continued if I can be arsed.

Much later edit, a bit of being arsed did follow and so as to have what followed united with what preceded, below it lies:

I promised, or at least mentioned the possibility of the continuation of thoughts relating to the previous post in future ones if arsed, and while I don't feel sufficiently motivated to involve myself in a joining the dots intellectual venture as might be normal within such a field of creative thought, still enough in the way of desire has manifested itself to at least get this far, and since it would make little sense to have gone this far by way of mere introduction without going further, then we can expect some more related material below, even if probably presented in a somewhat jagged, unrefined manner as it perhaps might, due to the slightly half-arsed nature of the desire to pursue the matter. . . . :

Within this literary world, intellectual disputation thrives regarding the existence or not and nature of an author responsible for this world. A rare voice questions the wisdom of such thought and its effectual pointlessness, but he is ignored as too many fools have invested far too much serious consideration to the matter to wish it to be brushed aside as besides the point. This simple thought is also too subtle for them for all its simplicity. They expect everything to be convoluted and difficult, and the greater the convolutions the more they insist on the seriousness with which they believe their nonsense to be imbued.

So as said, much thought relating to an Author, a being outside the universe but responsible for it. There was even much to be said about a Son, a direct incarnation within the universe of the Author, which area we could very fruitfully examine, and indeed might yet, but for now we will look at a third philosophical element of our characters' thoughts, and this interesting development was the idea of the Reader.



While thoughts such as 'How can we be free if we are the creation of an omniscient author' attached themselves to the hypothetical phenomenon of the Author, the Reader was more a development of what could be termed a liberal mindset. Rather than the feelings of inferiority the Author thought produced for many, the Reader was a more passive being, again omniscient, and yet merely an observer. Some did not like the sense of there being a witness to their actions, but others revelled in the idea and felt it gave their actions weight, and indeed enjoyed the sense of playing to a crowd.

However, scientific and parallel philosophical developments rendered this Reader a far more complex notion, with the declaration that there is no reality separate from the observer, that he is a part of it, and that reality is affected by the very act of observation. But the Reader was thought to not exist within this universe; he is outside it.

And so a thought that caused uproar and even disquiet was that if the Reader alters the events observed, as science holds he must, then this universe cannot be said to be a closed one. Its boundaries are illusory. It exists within the minds of the characters within itself, but simultaneously within the mind of an external observer, who because the act of reading or observation is a dynamic element of that which is read, is not an external observer after all. Just to mention rather than investigate the inevitably consequential thought that this universe or text may be one of many parallel texts.
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A few fragments of further discussion: This space beyond the frontiers of this universe are of the mind rather than the physical- the mind of the Reader- though given our understanding of the mind within this sphere, the mind exists within a spatial medium, and so the mind of the Reader is not simply an abstract sea of consciousness, but itself exists somewhere.

But it could be said that this somewhere within which he exists is merely the emanation of the mind of another hypothetical Author, and is itself a geography of the mind rather than space. As of course could be said to be the nature of our universe here.

But neither does the Author merely exist within the mind of himself. He must also require a physical world within which to exist so as to conceive of his conceptions such as this one. And a highly heretical thought was voiced that perhaps this Author was himself existing within an apparent physical dimension created by the imagination of another Author.

I think that's enough for now.