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“Death of the Author” Review: Nnedi Okorafor’s Book Addresses the Complex World of Writing and Publishing

“Death of the Author” Review: Nnedi Okorafor’s Book Addresses the Complex World of Writing and Publishing

Death of the Author

Death of the Author has a lot to say about the merciless arena where authors, publishers, and the reading public jostle for each other’s attention in a vortex of capitalist self-interest.

By Chimezie Chika

In 1967, celebrated French literary critic, Roland Barthes, published his influential essay, “The Death of the Author”, in which he argues that the discursive approach to literary criticism should eschew authorial biography to be able to excavate the true intent of the text. 

Barthes argues that individual interpretations are more authentic in seeking true literary intention than traditional literary criticism’s interest in the author’s “ultimate meaning”.

Barthes’ idea was not exactly new but he voiced a critical concern that has been expressed earlier in different forms by other scholars and groups, most especially Richards’ New Criticism school (though specific points differ).

Nnedi Okorafor’s new novel, Death of the Author, takes the meaning of the title literally but also raises nuanced questions about the world of modern writing and publishing. 

Death of the Author
Death of the Author

The novel follows the story of Zelu, a paraplegic struggling writer, who, after several rejections and frustrations in her personal and professional life, manages to pen a groundbreaking sci-fi novel that has publishers outbidding each other for rights. 

Overnight, Zelu finds herself at the center of fame and wealth. From here, the novel pays unflinching attention to the complex mechanisms that make today’s quintessential writer: orchestrations that go from the writer, to the publisher, to the agent, to the media, even while the center of the whole enterprise remains the author who most prop personal struggles against the public’s hungry eyes.

On the surface, Death of the Author is Okorafor’s most introspective, complex, and ultimately un-sci-fi-like novel. But, make no mistake, there is as much imaginatively dense science fiction here as could be found in anything in her oeuvre. But it is not part of the main story. 

This is how it works: Zelu’s wave-making sci-fi novel is called Rusted Robots, an engaging tale of a futuristic earth in which humans have long gone extinct, through their own reckless neglect of nature, leaving robots behind along with other automation, including evil AIs known as NoBodies. 

Throughout Death of the Author, we read linearly selected chapters from Zelu’s Rusted Robots. As we read, we begin to find the story in Zelu’s sci-fi novel as riveting as her own life in the main story in Death of the Author, if not more so. 

The novel within novel structure is a complex one and only the best writers are able to pull it off without seeming like amateur experimenters. It is a familiar turf for the sometimes obfuscating postmodern writers, but here, Okorafor makes her story in Death of the Author as real as possible. 

The point of view skips around too, from Zelu to her family members (her sisters, her parents) which gives us different perspectives on our feisty, high-spirited but still highly vulnerable heroine. The different points of view also cleverly fills in backstories that would have otherwise bogged down the main story, such as the many stories of Zelu’s childhood and, especially, how she came to be crippled. 

Surely, if there is one thing Okorafor knows particularly well, it is placing strong women at the centre of her stories. Death of the Author is no different. 

Death of the Author
Death of the Author

With a plot that moves with a lightness of touch and a movie-like precision, readers will find themselves glued to the pages of Death of the Author. I suppose this might have something, albeit marginally, to do with the novel’s adoption of standard romance tropes in some places, especially in the early chapters. 

The writing in Death of the Author varies between the slightly pedestrian colloquialism of the main story, whose tone is generally upbeat, and the steadier, elegiac tone of Zelu’s novel Rusted Robots. Nonetheless, given how inextricably linked Zelu’s authorial struggles (as well as her family and personal life) are to the writing of her novel, it makes Death of the Author, on the whole, quite feelingly elegiac. 

Thus, Rusted Robots, the novel within the novel we are reading, seems to be a metaphor for the main story, and therefore a metaphor for the real world. 

Complex political notations reel off from everywhere in Death of the Author: racism, treatment of disabled minorities, social media bandwagonism, the unrelenting intrusions of the media, drug use—Okorafor captures it all. 

Even in Zelu’s novel, a subplot featuring a scholarly robot named Udide, who transitioned from a body that has a beetle-like structure to a spider-like body, is an overt visual commentary on transgender identities, which remains, needless to say, a contentious political issue in the 21st century.

There are multicultural aspects to Death of the Author, part of what makes it, in essence, Okorafor’s most realistic work till date. That is, parts that convey Nigerian culture. 

For a writer who has built her fame on wild fantasy/sci-fi yarns, it appears to come natural to her (and of course it will be remiss to assume that this is her first time including such relatable tidbits of African life, but the point here is that it is, in this case, not done in the stereotypical futuristic universe of her oeuvre). 

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How one wishes then that Okorafor would deign to name things properly. For instance, merely calling oja (a distinct Igbo musical instrument) a flute does neither convey the distinct cultural and spiritual attachments that emanates from its music nor, to a degree, its physical structure. 

It is a lexical generalisation that might give non-Nigerian readers the wrong image of the musical instrument they are reading about. 

More than anything, Death of the Author is a story about storytelling. It seems to me that it adopts the general African tradition in folktales whereby the complexes of plot are determined by different tellers of the same story. 

The novel’s truest gem, however, is its commentary on modern writing publishing. No writer—I reiterate, no writer—would read this book and not experience emotions of varying degrees regarding an author’s rise to stardom and the issues surrounding the personal and public upheavals accruing thereof. 

Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor

What does it mean to pine for literary success in today’s world? How much are we willing, if it is within our powers, to sacrifice for it? (A lot of people would go astonishing miles, to be sure.) Or what role will environmental and psychological determinants play in our success or failure as writers?

Death of the Author has a lot to say about the merciless arena where authors, publishers, and the reading public jostle for each other’s attention in a vortex of capitalist self-interest. Nothing ever seems to be what it appears to be; authors and their lives may not be what they are envisioned to be, not least their families. 

Self-interest, it seems, is what drives modern human interactions, is what drives the modern human economy, though this may not immediately be obvious in the initial instance. Death of the Author’s unflinching gaze would have us all thinking about where the end product of our literary exertions would leave us. 

Is the author even important anymore? Will her death change anything? Will her concerns mean anything? What does the life of a writer, with its exhilarating zeniths and its abysmal nadirs, mean exactly in today’s world? A lot here could amount to a full course on the subject.

By the end, few will have any illusions that, with this novel, Okorafor has written perhaps her best work till date, one that readers of any conviction or bent will find something to take away from. Imaginatively robust in conception, it takes a subject that some recent novels, including R.F. Kuang’s befuddling popular Yellowface, has tackled and does something far better with it. 

Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1

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