🩳The Death of the Author

A short story

I

It was in the lesser novels of Carlisle Swift that the message began to appear. John supposed that some might call it a “theory” but a theory is something the scholar projects onto the work. A message is intentional. Like a love letter from writer to reader. And John was reading the letter through a film of coded symbols, not creating meaning, but finding it. A ghost in the machine.

Seated on a rough wooden stool within the great sepulcher of Swift’s library, John had been pouring over the great author’s tomes, loose letters, etc. ferreting lost footnotes and underlining Swift’s marginalia with a thin black pen. The thoughts of the author beside the thoughts of the author beside the thoughts of the author. All the while John watching a man think and rethink, like an old fencer dueling a young one, their movements frozen in frames of paper: Swift’s own works, his own marginal notes on his own works, his revisions to his notes, his notes on those revisions. Layers of years roughly sorted into three crude acts.

The young provocateur.

The great don of the literary scene.

The aged ascetic.

John had discovered the library, tucked away as it was in the inconsequential winter home of an inconsequential relation of Swift’s. Overnight, it seemed, a cadre of academics descended on the site each working feverishly to read, to research, and (hopefully) be the first to publish the next comprehensive monograph. Swift’s marginal notes (even in the works of others) became works themselves, worth studying and cataloging and devoting one’s scholarly lifetime to. And so the scholars flocked from obscure and underfunded departments to write respectful analyses, sensational monographs, and everything in between.

Each in its own right had become an exercise in scholarship, but the stories together sang of a life.

And in this finding, John had seen the message. The ghost.

That Carlisle Swift meant for this to happen, knew this library would be discovered, that he had created this library as a work of quasi-realism.

An installation masterpiece.

His magnum opus hidden in plain sight.

A story.

Even if that story was the story of a man reading books and thinking thoughts, and that in itself would be a story, and John and the others were living and working inside of it.

II

“John?”

“Mm”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the… energy.”

“Look! Look at this?”

“John. My mother died.”

“Can you hand me that binder?”

“John?”

“...”

“John?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

III

Swift has an interesting twist on the bottom of his ‘t’s.” As in his signature, they always twist inward, like a snake’s curving in on itself.

Using those twisting “t’s,” John found the lost writings. The things not in the library that led, inevitably back to it. What Swift had written on grocery lists. Or the back of napkins in pubs. Once, his name and phone number on a receipt.

Closer.

John was getting closer by showing that these writings were not like those in the library, that the boundaries of that great place were the margins of the page. The rows of shelves like lines on paper. The door, a cover of a great, oaken book.

IV

“Mr. Glasgow?”

“...”

“Mr. Glasgow!”

“Mm?”

“The project has a week left. I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes. Yes. I. Of course. Can you hand me that? Can you see this? Look at these?”

“What am I looking at?”

“Please leave a note next time.”

“And?”

“... he wrote it on a note. That he left. Wouldn’t this then be the note next time?”

“Well I expect he was talking to someone else.”

“But whom? We know he lived alone. So is this one of his notorious jokes of proto self-referentiality?”

“John, I’ll give it to you, you’re doing something magnificent here, but you only have a week.”

“And then?”

“It goes into storage.”

“But the placements! The way we found it all! How he left it! That would be like… that would be jiggling the words of Lear around until they formed entirely new lines. That would be textual suicide. We might never find…”

“Seven days John.”

V

He filed the note away as minutia in the folder packed with other marginalia. Concerning the tidbits, he knew that, given a few jots and tittles of Carlisle’s, the initial minutia might matriculate into something more than trivial.

No?

VI

“Carlisle Swift” (the name) was, he realized, the key. To the untrained ear, it doubtless sounded like one of many auteurs, but it was a nom de plume, like George Eliot, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad; his Christian name being Samuel Eliot Dozer. Therein (for John) lay the absurdity.

“Carlisle Swift” was an homage to two famous authors: Thomas Carlisle / Jonathan Swift: both last names taken as his first and last names respectively. But the oddities grew from there. Jonathan Swift, Thomas Carlisle. Jonathan Thomas, his own name. His symbolic connection with the author. One order of magnitude removed, the writer and the scholar of the writer. The writer’s unused material becoming John’s own.

The coincidence kept him up as he lay next to Susan. So hard to sleep through her sobs. When she finally dozed into a fitful, nervous rest he was generally left with many unfinished puzzles that would take him through until morning.

What did the coincidence of the names mean?

Perhaps it was that the leftover words of Carlisle Swift meant to be his own. Perhaps the chime of the universe strikes twice, and it is the curse of the second chime to have nothing left of any use to say, to be reduced to studying the inner workings that produced the first.

Carlisle Swift was beaten terribly as a boy by his father, by other boys at school. Artists generally are.

John had been left dreadfully unbeaten, and this, he thought, was likely the culprit for the lack of fire in his own artistic crucible, the misfiring that had left him intellectually formed but creatively misshapen, cursed to crawl inside the minds of artists, but never make the stuff of dreams himself.

VII

“Johnny?”

“I hate it when you call me that.”

“Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, it’s such a sweet little name you soft thing you…”

“What do you want, Herzog?”

He found that using his rival’s name was often the only way to disperse the ill will and teasing barbs. Herzog seemed to like hearing it. Likely the scrawny little queer had been beaten as a child. Perhaps that was why he was the author of several-half decent novels. Lucky bastard.

“Where’s that slip you saw the other day with the bit about Felicity on it?”

“You would be interested in that. You know they only spoke once.”

“Much can be said in few words, sweet pea.”

“It’s over there, filed under “F.”

“For ‘Felicity’?”

“For ‘found documents.’”

“Oh come on… that’s ridiculous… You’re being obvious now.

“Look, Herzog, not everything is a fruity love affair. There is no evidence that Swift had a consistent relationship.”

“... who said anything about consistent?”

“You did!”

“No… I didn’t.”

“I’m fairly certain that you did…”

Herzog’s head shook and his eyes rolled back, “... I’m going to go do some work.”

John stooped back over his desk and squinted, hard.

VIII

He was Carlisle.

He was the son of Carlisle.

He had killed Carlisle.

The reasons for the name began to grow and proliferate like snakes, snakes coiled and gnawing on one another until he couldn’t handle it any longer and struck out to the gross, corporate alcohol hole down the street. One stop removed from an AppleBees, but serving gin rickeys nonetheless, with a heavy hand, provided he explained to the fleshy bartender how they were made in slow, clear American English.

He was halfway through his fourth glass when the boy sat down next to him. He wasn’t really a boy, more long limbed and thick torsoed than a child, but he still carried that whiff of red, ripe freshness that the newly minted man can’t seem to stave off, that vigor which gradually fades with a decade of droll experience.

“Whatchu readin?”

“Nothing. Thanks... now I’m talking,” and then, in a rare effort at human communion, “It’s Carlisle Swift.”

“Who’s he to you?”

“A poet, novelist, and essayist. A proto-modernist or late realist depending on how you look at it. Lived around here maybe a hundred years ago. I’ve devoted my life to writing about him.”

“Ah, right,” said the boy, his nose crinkling with confusion. “You seem really into it.”

John was enjoying this more than he liked to admit. He hated teaching in the institutional sense, but this… this was alive and active and felt essential. Bringing the light of the gods to the people: “I,” said John, with appropriate gravity, “am trying to crack the mystery of his life’s work. That will be my life’s work.”

“Mystery?”

“Yes. Of why he kept his library a secret. What story he was trying to use it to tell.”

“Story? His library?”

“I’m convinced he was trying to send a message. I’ve looked through his marginal notes again and again and I’m getting closer to proof… but the trail is long and delicate and it keeps confounding me.”

“Huh.” said the boy. Then, raising his hands as if receiving a benediction, he added, “Maybe… it’s not that deep?”

John left so quickly, and in such a rage, he forgot to pay for the drinks.

IX

He had killed Carlisle.

He was the son of Carlisle’s son.

He had killed the son of Carlisle’s son.

Minutia building into meaningful units of understanding.

Units of understanding building to a whole.

The fragments coming together.

The puzzle complete.

In his last days, he began to see the library as a world entire, or the world entire as part of Carlisle’s library. Carlisle had doubtless written in the sand of beaches, scrawled on bathroom stalls, carved his name into the trunks of trees, fresh sheets of snow.

The project closed and the library went into storage, but he knew that it didn’t matter. That he would search to the ends of the earth for the hidden messages of the author, that with the author’s death, each bit of phallic graffiti, the writings of others in his era, the movements of markets and products in the ghostly shape of Swift’s purchases, that these too might be interpreted as messages. Ten ounces of sugar on the register of a local general store. A three-week stay at a small hotel in Newport abbreviated by a day. Two extra pairs of shoelaces twisting in on themselves in his pocket on the way home.

Some say that James Joyce stole a library book just to give the list of objects in Leopold Bloom’s house a sense of verisimilitude. What messages might Carlisle have sent, knowingly or otherwise?

He stopped showering.

Began taking his meals once every few days.

He lost his stipend and things around his shabby apartment began to fall into disrepair. One of the wheels on his dishwasher track broke, so he stopped washing dishes. Every spare instant of every day was a fragment of time that could go to finding Carlisle’s great, unified story. He rarely slept.

X

“She’s worried about you, love.”

“What?”

“Susan. She’s worried about you.”

“Oh. Right. Tell her I’m fine.”

“She doesn’t want you to tell her anything, she’s moved on, man. Married now.”

“Fine. What is it you came for then?”

“Frankly, I’m a bit worried about you too.”

“Don’t be.”

“Okay…”

“You should leave.”

XI

He was on his way to a park that Carlisle may or may not have frequented but that stood a chance of being relevant in the great quest his life had undertaken when, his arm aching with some alien pain, his binder scattered to the sidewalk. Slips of paper flitted like ash and when he stooped to pick up one of the closer pieces (a photograph of Carlisle as a young man) a shadow fell across him.

And he looked up.

And staring into the sun, John saw the face of the boy from the bar, red, and ruddy and wreathed in light.

And he realized the boy looked like someone he knew.