I simply do not write for those I do not know. I write for my reader whose identity and depth of being are experientially of several orders of magnitude more relevant to my existence than the stranger. The stranger is not my reader, his/her anonymity to me no more or no less irrelevant to my purpose as an authorial, writing voice than mine to alleged legitimacy through publication or rejection of such by self-appointed authority of whatever stripe. There is art beyond signature, deeper and further than this culture of aggrandising self or social positioning is prepared or capable of imagining. There was a time when the authorial act was the self-effacement of the subject in the awe-inspiring face of the sacred. Let it be contended as self-evident by those who care that in the private creations of the anonymous epistolary writer, lyricist or poet, the sacred is at the heart of their endeavour, muse oblige. They merely ask of themselves and their intimacy in readership not to succumb, in communicating, to the narcissism of the signal to a designated wider public. There is far too much to lose in what is signified in one’s work for that particular conceit to be any kind of semiotic horizon. That the writings of others both creative and analytical should inform, nourish, enrich, nuance, inflect and inspire the production of the author taking existential responsibility to simply write and be damned is, of course, also self-evident. Acknowlegement of this is however not co-extensive with suggesting that there is further reason to write or produce artistically than for the reader one knows personally, whether they ultimately see what is written or not.

 

While the biography and back-story of the writer who publishes and is thus legitimised authorially becomes a matter of interpretational, attributional and causal speculation for each and every work published in terms of inspiration, style, theme, and legacy, that of the publicly unknown author remains a familiar context from which deeper but not necessarily complete emotional and existential understanding derive for the intimately or personally known reader, dedicatee or muse, but ultimately suggest only the palimpsest of reason not the overlaid writing of purpose. So just as in literary and more generally artistic works there is indeed openness of interpretation, in the sense that Eco gives to it, in completing cogent readerly matrices of understanding from the fluid substance of the works in question, so too are such considerations to be found in the readerly responses of those for whom the work was expressedly written. Whatever indeterminacy remains in the writerly impulse, it is clearly only a question of the degree to which intentionality is actually known rather than constructed a posteriori and this, in the end, favours the readings of the person written for and known to the author in terms of anything worthwhile interpretationally. To know someone is to understand more of the person and so then of their work, however much there is still incompleteness and therein pleasure and emotion in filling the interstices with meaning. Such is the writerly-readerly pact, unsaid and unwritten.

 

So while the author does die in a Barthesian sense in giving up the vital space of meaning to his/her intimate reader, the private or publicly anonymous writer or artist more generally has the immense privilege of resurrection beyond the page in being the living, breathing originator and known embodiment of words dedicated to another living sensibility, whatever their ultimate sense-making. In the final analysis, the autonomy to express deep personal truths and entrust them only to those we actually know and love, however imperfectly, is an act of creative rebellion in a culture imbued with hierarchical futilities of status, legitimacy, alleged merit which say more about the socio-economic instrumentalisation of art whether in publishing or academia than it does about the existential impulse to breathe creatively. Talk and talk among your utilitarian selves, for whatever recognition I care precisely nothing for, I will write to and for the person I know and love. You will not take that last freedom from me. Such is my authorial act of testament, lasting or not.