"Undead Authors" paper from SWPCA conference 2010

Undead Authors: Anne Rice, J. K. Rowling, 

and Stephenie Meyer Battle

Roland Barthes on the Internet

            The appearance of the undead (whether figured as zombies or vampires) in a story always determines its genre as fantasy. All fantasy is not tales of the undead, but tales of the undead are always fantasy.  This is a commonplace, but recent activity on the part of some of fantasy literature’s most popular figures add a new, chilling layer to the relationship between the undead and fantasy. In spite of Roland Barthes’ 1964 assertion that the author is dead, Anne Rice, JK Rowling, and Stephanie Meyer refuse to stay in the coffin. They drag their decaying flesh around the internet doing what vampires and zombies do: consuming the living to perpetuate the illusion of life. It is certainly nothing new that authors reject the pronouncement of their death, but the internet has created a space in which the author can do the dark magic that renders them a creature of fantasy: they can keep their rotting bodies moving and acting by draining life from the living. In doing so, the fantasy monster does not change the fact that she is dead, she only sustains a terrifying illusion.

            What Roland Barthes said of the mid-twentieth-century literary criticism can be said of the internet:

The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews,

magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their

person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be

found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life,

his tastes, his passions….

I would assert that the internet maintains an image of literature “tyrannically centered on the author” and Barthes’ “histories, biographies, interviews, magazines, diaries and memoires” only has a few new additions: blogs, author’s official sites, fansites, and amazon.com. These new venues are unique in all history in that they permit readers to be writers in a space where the author is also just another writer. Barthes asserts that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.
” Online, we are all equally disembodied. The text upon which the author hangs her status (e.g. her novels) is a writing that can live in our blogs or fansites as an object without subjectivity. Barthes adds,
”No doubt it has always been that way.” But it has never been so obvious that the author is only a writer. And it is significant that this realization occurs when we are in a space where we, ourselves, are able to literally participate in the objectification of the author.  Of course, it is only when the nature of the undead thing is revealed to the living that they take up a fight against the repulsive thing.  There are no tales of the undead without human protagonists combating the zombies, vampires, or Frankenstein’s monster.  So, though the internet is a space in which the illusion of the author as a living creature is possible, it is also a field of battle. A close look at this battle reveals how the worldwide web has made Barthes’ conclusions about the relationships among authors, texts, and readers visible; and how that visibility has led to what is very like the final confrontation at the end of Dracula, Dawn of the Dead, or Frankenstein: a scene of carnage that is frankly unpleasant to witness.

            Let us consider our three most visible undead authors in chronological order. First is Anne Rice who has had a fascinating journey of her own from penning novels under two different pseudonyms to disguise herself to attaching her self to what Barthes calls the Author-God in the most overt way possible: asserting that her return to Catholicism is behind her new mission to write what one clever online commentator has called “Jesus fanfiction” (http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=19988). Rice has a sharp instinct for what the undead must do. She has made an ugly scramble to eat the brains of the living in her passionate fight against fanfiction that uses her characters. Online fanfic writers have not only been served cease and desist orders, according to a document found in several online fanfiction sites:

The attacks consisted of, amongst other things, e-mailed threats regarding not only

the writing of fanfiction but any writing that any fanfic author attempted to engage

in (regardless of who owned the copyright), attacks on businesses that the fanfic

authors owned and weeks of harassing personal letters sent to fanfic author's e-mail

addresses and guestbooks. Personal information about fanfic authors was also dug

up by Anne Rice employees and used as part of the harassment.

(http://www.angelfire.com/rant/croatoan)

Fanfiction is a remarkably living thing. It is created by writers who, by definition are readers and interpreters of fiction, exactly the force Barthes argues can only live after the death of the author.  Rice has published on her website her absolute dictum on fanfiction:  “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” Consequently, Rice enjoys a fanfiction-free undead life on the internet. However, writers of fanfiction are only the most obviously living creatures on the internet. Even the online venues where their books are sold taunt the undead with the voices of their readers.  The wild vitriol of Rice’s attacks against her readers who post on the internet is perhaps only explicable by seeing it as a fight for her (undead) life. Her September 6, 2004 rant on amazon.com’s “reader’s reviews” for her poorly received book Blood Canticle is otherwise mystifying. In it she makes the following attack on those who wrote less than positive reviews on the site:

For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art….Every word is in perfect place. The short chapter in which Lestat describes his love for Rowan Mayfair was for me a totally realized poem. There are other such scenes in this book. You don't get all this? Fine. Getting really close to the subject matter is the achievement of only great art. Now, if it doesn't appeal to you, fine. You don't enjoy it? Read somebody else. But your stupid arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander. And you have used this site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies. … be assured of the utter contempt I feel for you…

It is telling that Rice counters the authority of her readers with her presumed privileged relationship with the characters. She does not assert her legal rights to the characters. Rather, she asserts her personal relationship with them, particularly the narrator, traditionally the double of the author:

…the character who tells the tale is my Lestat. I was with him more closely than I have ever been in this novel; his voice was as powerful for me as I've ever heard it. I experienced break through after break through as I walked with him, moved with him, saw through his eyes. What I ask of Lestat, Lestat unfailingly gives.

Because the Author-God has created and found it good, the very act of interpretation is now closed. As Barthes explains:

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author…beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained.’

Anne Rice is more than aware of this. And the internet writers whose brains she wishes to consume seem to understand it too.

            Our next undead author is also fond of using the I-am-one-with-my-characters argument for silencing other voices. But JK Rowling has wisely decided not to become the zombie who beats down the door and eats the brains of the living from their crushed skulls. That kind of unpopularity isn’t her style. She would rather tap on the victims’ bedroom window and seduce the living into baring their necks. Rowling likes to fill in the blank spaces of her own novels after the fact by posting the new information on her website. Most famously, she announced, several days after the release of the last Harry Potter novel, that her unique relationship with the characters qualifies her to out Dumbledore. There’s no textual evidence for it, but we are to accept that Dumbledore is gay because she says so. Mind you, Dumbledore had been gay in thousands of fanfiction stories for years, but Rowling believes it will somehow matter that she says this. Though she has not sought the blood of fanfiction writers as Rice has, Rowing nevertheless strives to disprove Barthes’ pronouncement of her death. The most public display of this was her participation in a lawsuit brought by her publishers against Steve Vander Ark who had compiled the online Harry Potter lexicon. Mr. Vander Ark had the misfortune to be subjected to all of Ms. Rowlings’ various kill strategies.

            On May 15, 2004, Rowling launched her own website, a clever device designed to seduce and hypnotize her prey.  On it, fans are kept busy trying to solve puzzles she scatters throughout the site, enacting a pantomime of their status as her followers. She gloats over their mesmerized bodies by posting “facts” about her characters that are not in the books. The life-draining happens on the page where she links to all approved fansites and bestows awards to her favorites. One wonders if when Rowling gave her fansite award to the Harry Potter Lexicon on June 28, 2004, Mr. Vander Ark felt the sharp incisors on his throat. (HPL) Rowling effused upon the occasion, “This is such a great site that I have been known to sneak into an internet café while out writing and check a fact rather than go into a bookshop and buy a copy of Harry Potter (which is embarrassing). A website for the dangerously obsessive; my natural home.” (HPL) This ability to use her website as a carrot with which to control her fans was brilliant but it lasted only three years. Three years after singing Vander Ark’s praises, Rowling testified in court that his lexicon was “sloppy,” “lazy,” and “atrocious.” In court, Rowling asserted that Vander Ark’s work was of quality so poor it shouldn’t be allowed to see print. When it became clear that this made a great interview quote but not a legitimate legal argument, she brought out her other powerful kill strategy: charity. Vander Ark’s Harry Potter Lexicon had to die so that the author’s encyclopedia could live.  How Rowling’s as yet unwritten encyclopedia would be harmed by Vander Ark’s went unexplained as she went on to assert that proceeds from her encyclopedia would be donated to charity. Clearly, Rowling understands her status as an undead author better than Rice. Rowling makes no dictums, expresses no distain. Instead, she plays for sympathy, letting the press know that her motives are purely philanthropic.  But Rowling also told the press that the Vander Ark case has distressed her so deeply that it was inducing writer’s block. She warned that the turmoil had “decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month. You lose the threads, you worry if you’ll ever be able to pick them up again. I really don't want to cry, because I'm British.” This threat that challenges to her authority could lead her to withhold he writing from us became the stick to her website’s carrot. Rowling fights back with whatever is at hand. Sometimes vampires do.
           

But the threat to withhold writing from the living was a tactic Stephanie Meyer found useful too. Like Rowling, Meyer found having her own website useful for  maintaining the illusion that the author is not dead. On the internet, the space of living words, Meyer could seduce her fans away from places where they are writers into this site where only she speaks. Meyer had occasion to make her own dire threats on that site when, in the summer of 2008, while working on a much-anticipated Twilight sequel, copies of her manuscript (which Meyer had given to an acquaintance) went virile on the internet. No doubt, Meyer was sincere when she posted “I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being.” (http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/ August 28, 2008) At first too trusting of the living, Meyer has been wounded and she seeks redress from those who give her life, her readers. But feeding on them does not serve her purposes. What Meyer wants is not nurishment but justice and that may involve a bit of brutality to get her creator’s attention. Frankenstein’s monster hunted Victor’s loved ones. Meyer hunts her own characters, the beloveds of all her readers:

So where does this leave Midnight Sun? My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything. If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story. In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely…. I am now focusing on spending more time with my family and working on some other writing projects.

In refusing to allow us to be readers anymore, we are deprived of our claim to life. That’s a grim kind of justice but a monster takes what she can get. Essentially, this strategy amounts to the frantic scene at the end of the horror story where the monster threatens to kill any innocent bystander in the vicinity, set fire to the building, sink the ship, or kill all of Victor Frankenstein’s family if not allowed to imitate the living.

            Of course, the most interesting tales of the undead make us feel a nagging sympathy for the undead. But the fact remains that they are unnatural things, almost certainly without souls. And they do harm to the living. In the end, we must take up our pitchforks against the monster, our wooden stakes against the vampire, or whatever head-removing device we have at hand against the zombie in order to do what Barthes calls “the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner.” The life is in the language, not the author. The author ceased to be when the words fell on the page. It’s not pleasant to watch the undead writhing in a re-death agony, but it’s necessary so that the reader can live. And the reader lives no where more visibly than online where we can acknowledge with Barthes that “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Asserting that authors are just writers like anyone else and that they are, in the end, not original originators of originality but rather “eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic … whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.”

The internet is the space in which we can all see that the undead thing can be combated and that its elimination may well be possible. A new day dawns at the end of the tale of the undead.  The living can reclaim their world, a world that perhaps did not appreciate the beauty of the living until it was threatened by the undead. As Barthes says at the end of his essay, “Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer … we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”