Somehow, Author Returned
an update
(The offending text.)
(Previously, on this subject. See also BDM and John.)
The literary world was rocked this week when Jamir Nazir, the author of the prize-winning, probably AI-generated short story “Serpent in the Grove” (which, unlike Nazir himself, hardly rises to the level of fiction), emerged from silence to defend his creation. To The Observer’s Erica Wagner, he writes:
My writing process is unusual – it is conducted entirely on an Android phone. This is a necessity driven by chronic health conditions which make sustained, desk-bound typing physically impossible. That is why I rely on speech-to-text to do my writing, followed by minimal keyboard editing, along with the same process of speech-to-text. I have used this in my professional life and also to produce my story for the Commonwealth competition.
Sure! Wagner then submits Nazir’s photograph to an AI checker, which tells her that it, the photograph, is “at least heavily edited.” This seems to cause a short in Wagner’s brain. She writes about Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns, how hard this is all getting, she tugs her forelock about the vanishing faintness of the border between reality and fiction. Then she writes,
In the year of my birth, the French theorist Roland Barthes wrote of the death of the author—
Let me stop you right there, Erica Wagner! I have great news! The Author is not dead! The Author is alive! I know, I was shocked too!
The thing is, what happened was, The Author died, but then Mr. Fantastic, Sue Storm, and the Human Torch went to Heaven to ask Jack Kirby to bring him back to life, and Jack just did it! So now The Author’s back! Then The Author got crushed by a boulder and so Aunt Harriet had to come live at Wayne Manor to take care of Dick and Bruce, but a mad scientist brought The Author back to life 28 issues later and turned him evil, but Batman talked The Author around again. Then the author died stopping Doomsday from destroying Metropolis. Everybody came to the funeral—The Modern Subject, The Enlightenment Self, The Emerging Bourgeoisie, The Reader, The Common Reader (never seat those two next to each other), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Even The International Proletariat put in an appearance—he so rarely comes to anything. The Ineffable gave a lovely eulogy. It was all real sober. But then Batman fed The Author into a machine rigged out with Kryptonian matrix energy and The Author came back to life, very angry and moody. He beat up the entire Justice League but then Lois Lane (Amy Adams) told him he smells nice and things were copacetic.
The Author, it turns out, had a baby with the Green Goblin while he was dead. That took some getting used to.
The Author turned into Dark Phoenix and killed a planet. That turned out to be a clone of The Author, though.
The Author fell into a Lazarus Pit. You know how that goes.
The Author merged with the Speed Force, but then he un-merged.
Superboy-Prime punched the walls of his universe so hard that it brought The Author out of his grave.
The Author has a ton of robot doubles. That’s who died. Not The Author.
Anyway. Point is. The Author’s not dead, so we don’t even have to use that literary-critical cliche anymore. Ever. We can appeal to literally any other theorist. We can skip the whole boring argument. The Author Is Dead Is Dead, world without end, amen.
The author is dead but also alive at the same time. I call this Roz’s Paradox, and you can just leave the Nobel prize on the doorstep next to the MacArthur Grant
The Author might be dead, but there's a man-shaped assemblage of vegetable matter perambulating over there that has convinced itself it is The Author, so for all intents and purposes, The Author is alive.