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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli
Although it's apparent that I don't speak for everyone here, I think that the very much greater part of us are fans of Tolkien, not fans of Middle-earth. We love Giles and Smith and Niggle as well, and the Letters- all as windows into an idiosyncratically brilliant mind. Who on earth would read a book about Leopold Bloom by somebody other than Joyce? Would you give two pins for the Further Adventures of Huck Finn by I. M. A. Hack--- or even by Saul Bellow?
Great authors are unique. They're not fungible commodities.
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Eggzackly.
It's all fine and dandy all this postmodern footling and pottering, but there are ultimately a few rules and one of them, no matter how much French academics in the 60s doped up on who-knows-what try to be all clever about the Author being Dead, is that a particular person writes a book. No, you don't write it. No, I don't write it. Only one person writes it. Sorry, but there is no glory in the reader claiming to be the author too, because they aren't. They are a reader, and are free to make up what 'meaning' they will from a book, but they did not sit there and put the words on the page, and that's the end of it.
Theories? There's only so far that the theory can go until like all theories, it collapses in a gibbering heap somewhere around its own hairy navel and we all start laughing at it. If that makes me no better than one of the apes who puzzles at the monolith at the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey then so be it. Rather that than make myself disappear up said ape's butt.