What are the implications of a cultural-production model where an author increasingly functions as a lich, a wizard who cheats death by magically preserving part of her/his soul in a material container? While the archaic English word “lich,” meaning both “living body” and “corpse,” dates back to Beowulf, 21st-century readers may recognize the term from Dungeons & Dragons, which over the last four decades has deployed the lich as an evil, powerful undead spellcaster. The type is not limited to D&D; though J. K. Rowling does not use the word, her Voldemort (preserved by his Horcruxes) the most famous modern lich.
My theory of the author-as-lich, the decaying but powerful figure who tries to cheat death by writing, or by storing her/his soul in a textual box, helps us understand the persistence of the authorial-intent model after Foucault and Barthes (the Author should be dead, but s/he stubbornly refuses to lie down). Building on Jonathan Gray’s recent theory of the “undead author,” I use Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One (2011, coming film adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg) to show how an author may try to preserve her/his essence, guarding it against the ravages of an increasingly collaborative and changeable digital world.
I demonstrate how James Halliday, the insecure, nerdly author of RPO’s “OASIS” (the virtual world dominating Cline’s futuristic dystopia), represents both the decline of authorial importance and furious rebellion against that decline. Though Halliday dies before the action of RPO begins, he hides his essence in the OASIS, creating puzzles and games that only devoted students of his thousand-page personal journal can win, offering wealth and power to his most ardent fans. Indeed, Halliday appears once as an actual D&D lich, testing one promising teenager’s fanaticism to ensure that Halliday himself will never be forgotten.
About the presenterJonathan Kotchian
Jonathan Kotchian (PhD and MA in English, UConn; BA in Theater, Yale), after finishing a postdoctoral fellowship in digital humanities at Georgia Tech, has recently joined the Department of English at Florida International University, where he teaches in the Writing & Rhetoric Program. He is completing a book project on satire and authorial distinction in early modern England, and his next project explores authorship through historical changes in concepts of intelligence, stupidity, and taste.