For the Bird Is Mortal
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Date
2025-06
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
Acknowledging the drift from any point of origin as necessary to a text’s survival, this dissertation seeks to imagine the possibility of the messianic return of the author or the referent to the text. For the Bird Is Mortal, a piece of metaphysical detective fiction, is structured around dual quests. The nested narrative follows a writer’s search for a mode of textual expression foreclosing divergence from his authorial intent while the frame narrative focuses on a reader-critic’s attempts at recovering the intention behind the writer’s work. The failure of these quests articulates, as the novel’s central problematic, the death of the author and the occlusion of the referent. This failure compels the characters to abdicate authority over what they produce or read and instead to practice negative capability in both the creative and the interpretive acts. A hermeneutics of the negative in response to a poetics of the negative at length makes space for a provisional moment of understanding between the characters.
Offering a framework for the novel, the foreword puts the novel’s thematic concerns in dialogue with the work of Jacques Derrida. The first section outlines the various positions on the question of authorial intent. Qualifying Barthesian anti-intentionalism, it proposes a hauntological model of authorship whereby the author is neither fully absent from or present in the text but rather in spectral survival. The second part investigates the working of iterability across the narratives For the Bird Is Mortal comprises, demonstrating a principle of afterwardsness that spoils the purity of the text’s referential function. The third section addresses the ethical implications that follow on the retreat of provenance or point of origin under the operation of afterwardsness. It argues that misprision is irresponsible not for its drift from intent/referent but in its truth claim, its attempt to overcome the text’s survival. The last section of the foreword posits that afterwardsness pushes the intent/referent into the space of radical alterity. The appropriate response to this “secret” is receptivity to that which is to come. The project identifies the future negative as the site of a coincidence between intention and reading.