“The removal of the author,” writes Roland Barthes, in his famous essay, “is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text. . . . [T]he modern scriptor is born at the same time as his text; he is not furnished with a being which precedes or exceeds his writing.” Challenging and playing with this Barthian dilemma, Jill Hartman introduces a painted elephant as author-persona, who makes explicit what Barthes argues is implicit in all texts: “a fabric of quotations . . .
