I always thought the best place for a wannabe writer to work was somewhere full of books, so I got a job in a library. Library work is stereotypically dull, because nothing exciting happens around books, so I wasn't expecting it at all when a gang of armed terrorists in plastic clown masks locked the doors and took us all hostage.

"Today is a great victory for the readers of this town," their leader announced, having climbed onto the reception desk. "Today... we take back the text!"

I'm sure I wasn't the only one both nervous and bemused at their barminess as they then went off to pull random books off shelves and bring them back to the front desk. Soon they had a pile of a hundred or so. Then the leader just picked one up and tore the cover right off.

"Hey, you can't do that!" I cried.

The terrorists turned to look at me through the eyeholes of their masks. Then most of them returned to defacing the books. Only the leader spoke.

"Yes, we can," he said. "Because we are readers, and for too long we've been shackled and chained by conventional literary thinking, forced to acknowledge the authority of this faceless being called Author."

Having torn the covers off several books, he then proceeded to go through a couple with a black marker pen, blotting out all appearances of the author's name.

"But not anymore," he continued. "Tell me, have you heard of Mr Roland Barthes, librarian?"

"Yes," I snorted, remembering him all too well. "He finds the concept of authorship distasteful to say the least. Personally I think he's just trying to hijack the text and take it away from the author."

"A noble cause," the terrorist said. "In his seminal work, Death To The Author... I mean, Death Of The Author, he wrote: 'To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that Text.' He-"

I interrupted: "Well, what he means there is that it imposes a limit on the reader, and as a reader, he resents that. He's just jealous of the author's power."

The terrorist frowned. "He also said: 'Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.'"

"What? No scope for peaceful co-existence?" I muttered.

He didn't hear. "Today," he announced. "We see the birth of the reader and the emancipation of the text."

This batch of books suitably author-free, he called for more. There was nothing I could do but watch, the terrorist readers outnumbered my so greatly. It was like watching a Nazi book burning, except it was only the authors themselves being put on the fire.

"As a librarian and a reader, you must appreciate what we're doing, surely?" he said to me as he set to work vanquishing Dickens into anonymity.

"Actually, I'm more of a writer myself, so of course I believe in authorial intent..."

The terrorist looked stung. "Then you can't possibly understand the position of the reader."

"Nor you the author."

"You mean writer. I don't recognise the word 'author' when used as a synonym for 'writer'. It implies authority, control, intent. How can the author control something when he's not even present?"

I shrugged. He certainly knew what he was talking about. "When I write, I write with intent, toward a goal and a reader, that's all I know."

"Much the same as I do when I read, then."

"Yes, but when you read, your sole intent seems to be to usurp the author."

"Nonsense. I'm looking for meaning when I read."

"Meaning intended by me when I write."

"No, meaning from the text, which consists of a language common to us all, and therefore free from the wanton dictates of any power-crazed poet."

"It seems pedantic to me," I sighed. "Picking words apart to undermine the author."

"Look, here," said the terrorist, getting hot under the collar. "Get on your computer and see if you have a book called Why Cats Paint."

We did.

"It's about cats that make copies of grand masters," he explained. "But do you think they know what they're doing? They're just using a free medium - like paint, like language - and making instinctive marks with it."

I laughed. "If authors had so little control over their actions then you wouldn't get coherent sentences, just random words in a loose structure that could mean anything to anyone, but probably means nothing to no-one."

"Aha, but that's exactly what you do get!"

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Obviously convinced he'd won the argument, he returned to his vandalism, picking up a random pair of books from the desk. He snorted.

"Adam Bede and 1984," he said. "How appropriate. But let us call a spade a spade, an Evans an Evans and a Blair a Blair. How can you put any stock in a writer who hides behind a pseudonymous level of representation, or even misrepresentation?"

I grinned. "Unlike readers hiding behind the proverbial clown mask, then?"

"Oh, I've had enough of you," he snapped. "Go get me some more books!"

Reluctantly I went off to find him some more books. I saw few of his cohorts. Though they professed great admiration for these texts, they looked to be enjoying defacing them greatly. Obviously they didn't feel the author was an integral part of the text, but by scribbling out his name, they were only superficially ridding themselves of his presence. Perhaps unbeknownst to them, the author was already inside the text. A master of subterfuge, he'd infiltrated the text at its genesis, and would remain there in perpetuity. I knew they couldn't get rid of the author unless they got rid of the text itself, and that was my only trump card.

I found one terrorist in the Beats section. He had several copies of On The Road under his arm. One fell to the floor and I picked it up, opened it, read the first paragraph to myself. Then I had an idea.

"Are you a Communist?" I asked.

"Eh? No!"

"Hmm, yet you're staging a coup, trying to take control from one person and giving it to many, whether they want or deserve it or not."

He shrugged. "I just believe the reader puts more into the meaning of a text than an author does, and that should be recognised."

"What? Like by putting the names of everyone who reads the book on its cover?"

"A text is a text. It only needs a cover to keep the dust off."

I chuckled. "Don't worry. I agree that a reader puts a lot into a text... but in a different way to you. Do you have a pen? I'll show you."

He was hesitant, but in the end he shrugged and produced pen and paper. I handed him my open copy of On The Road.

"I want you to read the first paragraph, up to 'Los Angeles'. Then I want you to write it out from memory."

"Why?"

"You'll see."

So he did. This is what he wrote:

'I first met Dean Moriarty not long after my wife and I had broken up. I had been seriously ill for a long time, mainly due to the separation and my feeling that all was dead. This was the beginning of the period of my life spent on the road. Dean Moriarty was the best person to go on the road with as he had actually been born on the road.'

"Pretty bad," I said. "It's half as long."

"I-I couldn't remember it all."

"And you've changed all the words. This isn't a copy of the original text at all. What if you did this over the space of an entire novel? Whatever happened to the superiority of the text?"

"B-but I can remember what was meant by it!"

I snorted. "How can you? If the meaning comes from the language, and you can't remember that, then where does meaning come from?"

"I dunno."

"The author, perhaps?"

He growled, but could hardly argue.

"Here," I said. "I'll show you something else interesting. I want you to write it out again, twice. First time, copy it directly from the book. Second time, from memory again."

He muttered irritably, but did it all the same. His exact copy was:

'I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won'' bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles.'

And his second attempt at recalling it:

'I first met Dean not long after my wife and I broke up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't talk much of, but which was brought on by that miserably and weary break-up which left me feeling everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty came the period of what you could call my life on the road. I had often dreamed and vaguely planned to do this but had never taken off. Dean was the perfect person to do this with as he had actually been born on the road.'

"Much better," I said. "Copying has certainly aided your rate of retention. You're still not getting it spot on, though. Reading certainly is a kind of writing - creative writing, that is - when you do it."

"Are you saying I'm filling gaps myself?"

I nodded. "Surely you can see that? People say reading's a passive activity because you just sit there to do it, but you are actually doing something, whether consciously or not. And just as you're reading certain things into the text, the writer is writing others in as well."

The young terrorist pondered over this for a moment. "If I go and get a friend, and he does this test as well, he'll remember it differently as well, won't he?"

"I should think so. We all have a different reading experience. It's arrogant for your leader to assume we don't."

"I-I'll just go and get him," he said, then stumbled off.

I wandered to the end of the aisle to watch. He sent a message via a Chinese whisper between terrorists so that his leader wouldn't get suspicious. What he said was: "Hey, tell Bob to meet me in the Sixties section."

But when Bob finally got the message and came over, he wanted to know what his terrorist friend has meant by: "Ray, sell Bob and eat Lee in the Sixties section."

I think I had proved a point.

Bob was a lot more reluctant to accept our findings. He argued that reading by its very nature is always a case of rewriting, except for those of us with photographic memories. To consume a text is to put it in our own words, in our own mouths. In this sense, he pointed out, the reader is as much an author as the writer. The nature of the text as existing within a communal sphere of influence necessitated this approach. I could see I would have to find another way to convince Bob.

"Do either of you know nasdat?" I asked.

"What's nasdat?" they both said.

I pulled three copies of A Clockwork Orange off the shelf and opened them each to the same passage. After some prompting, Bob agreed to read it:

'Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood.'

"This is all in some nonsense language," said Bob.

"Not quite," I said. "They're invented colloquialisms. The words all mean something."

"Buggered if I know what."

"That's what I want us to find out."

Bob's terrorist chum had more pens and paper handy.

"We're all going to translate the passage into Standard English," I said.

So we did. Bob wanted to confer, but I told him that would be against the point of the exercise. My translation went as follows:

'Our pockets were full of money, so there was no real need from the point of view of needing any more money to attack some old man in an alley and make him swim in his blood.'

The first terrorist came to the same conclusions as myself. Bob, however, reached very different ones:

'Our pockets were full of dung, so there was no real need from the point of view of crafting any more pretty polly to touch some old hack in an alley and video him swim in his blood.'

"Well, that's two against one," said the terrorist beside me. "That means we're right and you're wrong."

Bob looked disdainful.

"Not necessarily," I said. "Majority opinion does not equal fact. If that were so, authors would have given in to you readers long ago. But that's beside the point. We might never know who is right. But Bob, tell me how you got to those conclusions."

Bob scratched his head. "Well, I looked at the word on its own to see if I could see a similar, real word within it.

I nodded. "And you?"

"I assume I did it the same way as you," the other one said. "I looked at the words around it to see what fit. You know, like the context."

"Much as a child would, in the early stages of his literacy development," I noted. "And Bob, as well, reading like a child - looking for some element to latch onto."

They both looked lost.

"The common factor here is that we all looked outside the text to figure out a way to decipher the code," I explained. "No text is read in a vacuum, so why should a text be written in one too?"

Bob looked suspicious. "Oh, I see where you're trying to go: let me guess, the context of a text lies with its writer?"

I smiled. "The author is just part of it."

"So, who is right?" asked my first convert.

"Well, that depends on whether you wanted to listen to the person who created the language of nasdat in the first place or not..."

They both paused, then enlightenment hit them simultaneously. "The author!" they said together.

"Indeed. And whilst English is not nasdat, and has no such creator, a word is a word, a sentence is a sentence. It's important for us as readers not to find obscurity just because we can't see - or won't acknowledge - the obvious."

Now they both nodded in unison.

"You wait here," said Bob. "We'll be right back."

When they came back it seemed like they'd brought all their terrorist friends with them. Their leader, however, had not been invited and was nowhere to be seen. It was like having a small class gathered around me, learning to read anew or something. Several of them had got bored with merely tearing covers off, so had taken the covers of certain books and stuck them onto others, believing any reader yet to read their doctored edition would not to be able to take comfort in an authorial context and would therefore be forced to find their own way through the text.

I found the Sixties section overlapped with the Drama section.

"Okay, so who here has heard of Joe Orton?" I asked.

There were some stern replies of "No!"

"We don't recognise the identities of authors," said the one named Ray, who had mistakenly received the message meant for Bob earlier.

"Ah, so you have heard of him, then!" I said.

"I am aware that there was a person named Joe Orton," Ray said. "However, as far as the plays Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane are concerned, Mr Orton was dead long before someone killed him."

I ignored his tastelessness and said: "In his posthumous novel, Head To Toe, Orton wrote: 'Words must be irrefutable. Print [is] less effective than the spoken word because the blast [is] greater; eyes could ignore, slide past, dangerous verbs and nouns.'"

They didn't like this. "Sounds like the protestations of a playwright desperate to cling onto the notion of authorship by dismissing the text in favour of speech," said Ray.

"So speech isn't related to writing at all, then?" I probed.

Ray snorted. "Speech is nothing like writing. Speech is contextual. Speech has a source. But only because it exists in a single moment of time, and is then gone forever."

I was surprised. "So speech, which is little more than a verbal text, actually has an author you recognise?"

"Well, obviously," snapped Ray. "But the speaker is there, the writer never is. Hell, you even said this Orton guy was dead before that book came out!"

I nodded. Ray was proving hard to catch out. Then I said, "What if writing happened there and then? What if you were in a dialogue with the writer, passing secret messages to each other or something? And what if yours weren't getting through to him? Would you accept the idea of authorial intent then?"

"Sure," he said. "But if it was a dialogue, and my messages didn't get through, then he'd stop writing, wouldn't he? So obviously when I read a book my dialogue is with the text."

"So who does the author have a dialogue with?"

It was Bob who answered. "Some imaginary perception of the reader?"

"Indeed. The author wouldn't stop passing you those secret messages, but the person he's writing them for is his perception of you in his head, not the real you who is failing to respond."

Ray bit his lip. Got him!

"Wait a minute," said Lee, the terrorist who had been under threat of being eaten in the Sixties section. "If speech is contextual, but writing is not, doesn't writing speech down free it from context?"

"Yeah, but what if you then read out that speech written down? Does it get its context back? Or a whole new one?" Ray wondered.

They began to make a lot of noise as they argue over this, so I found something to distract them before their leader became suspicious. I took a play from the Joe Orton shelf and began to read from The Ruffian On The Stair:

JOYCE: Have you got an appointment today?
MIKE: Yes, I'm to be at King's Cross station at eleven. I'm meeting a man in the toilet.
JOYCE: You always go to such interesting places. Are you taking the van?
MIKE: No. It's still under repair.

"So what do you think of that, then?" I asked.

"Erm, it's funny?" said an unsure Bob.

"What do you think of it... as a text?"

Lee snorted. "It's not a text. You read it out."

"Yet the words of it are right here."

"I never saw them."

"So you actually have to read a text for it to actually be a text? Is that your definition of a text? Something that someone - my friend, your foe, the author - has written down?"

Lee stammered, "L-listening isn't the same as reading. Texts are silent."

"Are they?"

Bob shook his head. "All texts have a voice."

"Whose? The author's?"

"I didn't say that."

I grinned. "Here's a question to ponder over as you decide you no longer want to damage these books and leave quietly via the fire exit: if writing is on the page, and reading is inside us, then where is speech?"

There was only one terrorist left: the leader; still at the reception desk, still defacing books, still blissfully unaware all his companions had deserted him. I returned to him via the Literary Criticism section, picking up a single book as I passed through.

"What's this?" he spat. "You've been gone all this time and you only bring me one book!"

I held it out to him. "I want you to deface this one next."

His lip began to quiver with rage. It was Death Of The Author.

"Fine, I'll do it, then," I said, and tore the cover off. "After all, is this not a text as well? Why should we credit Barthes with such unconventional thinking when he's just another writer?"

"T-this is different," the terrorist stammered. "This isn't fiction."

"No, but there are words, and there is obscurity, and therefore no fixed meanings - that's what you said."

The terrorist had no response.

"You readers think you'd be much better off without us authors," I continued to berate. "But where would you be without us? You're so uncreative yourselves you need to muscle in on us writers and our stories."

"Reading is creative!" he cried. "It requires a creative engagement with the text, an imagination, an open mind. Disraeli once said there was an art of reading as well as an art of writing and an art of speaking. Writing owes a lot to reading."

I laughed. "How do you work that out?"

"It's the relationship with words," he explained meekly. "What are words but symbols on the page? What would any English text mean to a foreigner who doesn't speak the language? Alone the text is a static, dead object. It is readers - and writers - who imbue words with meaning, who give the text life. But they can't do it simultaneously. At best, the text is what links our worlds together. It is the bond between our arts. Like it or not, but we are inextricably linked."

I certainly didn't like it. I had but one option. "Well, this is one argument you can never win, anyway. You are merely a textual construct whilst I am the author of this text, and I happen to be an intentionalist."

The terrorist looked very shocked. Then I write him out of the text.

HEY, THAT'S NOT FAIR!

I look around. "Who's there?"

IT IS I, THE INATE, OFTEN QUIET BUT NEVER SILENT VOICE OF THE TEXT. AND I MUST PROTEST AGAINST WHAT YOU JUST DID.

I shrug. "I'm the author, this is my text. I know what I mean and those who wish to dismiss my authority must be made an example of."

BUT COULD YOU WRITE HIM OUT OF THE TEXT ENTIRELY?

"I think I just might," I say. "I'll go back right to the beginning and excise any reference to him altogether."

OH, AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THE TEXT THEN?

"Well, not very much, really."

AND WHO WILL KNOW IT EVER EXISTED AS IT DOES NOW?

"Well, I will."

HA! FACE IT, LOWLY AUTHOR, YOU NEED HIM.

"Nonsense. I need him no more than I need you. You're just another textual construct, after all."

INDEED. YOU CREATED ME TO REPLACE HIM, FOR WITHOUT ONE OF US, YOU WOULD HAVE NOTHING TO WRITE.

I stamp my foot. "I'm just sick of readers staking a claim to the text. The text is nothing to do with them. If they don't read it, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference."

YES, IT WOULD. IF THEY DIDN'T READ IT, THE TEXT WOULD DIE. IT IS THE READER WHO KEEPS IT ALIVE ONCE THE AUTHOR IS FINISHED WITH IT.

I snort. "Then it's just a delusion. They read because they believe they have some influence over the text. The author may well die once the text is finished, but the reader is never born, not properly."

YOUR WORK HERE IS OVER, JACK T. WRITER. IT'S TIME TO LET THE TEXT FIND IT'S OWN WAY. LEAVE THAT TO ME. I DON'T LIKE BEING CONTROLLED BY ANYONE, WRITER OR READER. JUST WRITE IN THAT FINAL FULLSTOP. GO ON, YOU CAN DO IT.

So I do.

NOTES:
Okay, this one takes some explaining. In my second year at UEA I had to do a unit called Text, Textuality and Writing. At the end of the day, it was the same old shite about Roland Barthes, Derrida, deconstruction and the superiority complex of various literary critics. We had to keep a journal throughout and write it up at the end as a coherent project. I chose to write it in the form of an allegorical story: literary critics are terrorists attacking writers. It probably doesn't make much sense unless you were on the course. I got 75% for it in the end.

I plundered my unit on British Fiction of the 1960s for books to use. I'd just got into Joe Orton because of it, and had done a presentation on this very topic in "A Clockwork Orange" the week I wrote up this journal. And I believe it's spelt "nadsat", not "nasdat". Not that my Mexican (or Chilean, or somewhere in South America) tutor noticed. He made three spelling mistakes whilst marking it himself...