books@cc.

by Gilbert Adair (1992)

An short and engaging thriller, The Death of the Author is a satirical story about a literary pretensions and bombast. Léopold Sfax, a Frenchman who emigrated to the United States, is a prominent literary academia who wrote “The Theory”, a variation of by now an all too familiar deconstructionism.

Sfax, one of the most (if not the one) celebrated critic in the United States, who — in a mirror to De Man’s story (and now perhaps Günter Grass, by a modest stretch of imagination) — had in his youth wrote sympathetic pieces for the Nazi under a pseudonym Hermes. His two masterpieces, The Vicious Spiral and Either/Either, partly if not mostly born out of his desire to conjure “an alibi that would say, ultimately: there can be no ‘because’ for a crime [he] only appeared to commit,” ironically of course brought him to great fame and interest in every aspects of his life, an even greater threat to the discovery of his past. When Astrid Hunneker, one of his (infatuated) students contacts him to write his authorised biography, Sfax, as the narrator of the story, gives us calculated different versions, turning back again and again to the same point and departing to different ones.

The title itself is an obvious reference to Barthes’ essay — indeed, one of the main attractions of this novella is its well-concocted mixture of tongue-in-cheek facts (especially from New York school) and fictions, weaved together with the integration of the theory itself inside the story. I picked this book up after reading Adair’s excellent translation of Georges Perec’s La Disparition (trans. A Void).

Tags:academia, fiction, thriller
Adair, Gilbert, fiction

May 4, 2007 @ 3:52 am