Thrilled to have this flash fiction in the latest edition of Gargoyle Online. A million thanks to Richard Peabody. And because “Creatural Homage” is so strange, I’m offering my own close reading. I hope you’ll read the piece before the explanations!
* * *
Notes on “Creatural Homage”
Did I ever love at the University of Wisconsin reading literary criticism in a journal called The Explicator and later doing close readings for students and writer friends. This is my first time writing up a close reading of my own published work, largely because I have never before written, much less published, a story like “Creatural Homage.” As it happens, it’s also the only piece I have ever submitted without getting any reader feedback. And an unusual one for me too because I sent to only one journal — to Richard Peabody at Gargoyle. Richard has supported my work like no other litmag editor. This makes my fourth appearance in Gargoyle since 2011, following a short story and a short-short in the print version and another short-short in Gargoyle Online.
On to my explication of “Creatural Homage”:
It’s flash speculative fiction, dystopian, satirical, with imbedded jokes, set at some point in the future, when a human, apparently, writes something in — but far outside the stylistic bounds of — an AI program, where then, the protagonist get highly negative feedback through the same program (the Jeeshh section). The story speculates about a future time when a nearly all-encompassing AI program incorporates online shopping, tutorials, and more. In “Creatural Homage,” the AI entity is called Jee.
(An aside: The inspiration arose in part from my experiences with ChatGPT. In December 2022, shortly after its release, I tried using the chatbot to create a study guide for a recently published book assigned in my son’s eighth-grade English class. ChatGPT hallucinated just about everything, down to page citations. This past spring, when I asked it a historical question about baseball, ChatGPT once again made up facts.)
On the language level, “Creatural Homage” predicts a greater hybridization of English and Spanish than we might typically experience today. There’s one real Spanish word in the story, “listo” (English: “ready”) and invented terms. “Popalabras” combines “poco” (for “little” or “few” or “not many”) and “palabras” (“words”) to mean short prose; “granpalabras” denotes book-length works. The coinage “extremidaddies” struck me as a concise pseudo-Spanglish word that would bring to mind “extremities” — as in, a future way of saying something cost an arm and a leg. Although, one friend who read the story after I submitted it thought “extremidaddies” meant “big bucks,” having envisioned portraits of the Founding Fathers and early presidents on stacks of money. There’re also other made-up words imagining future slang, including “tokked” (derived from TikTok) for “sent a video,” and “apayd,” to suggest mobile payments like Apple Pay will become so ubiquitous, they’ll be represented in a verb.
The bit about “gofundmes” foretells a cynical virtuous cycle, for lack of a better term: Jee incentivizes richer people to donate money to poorer people whenever they buy something for themselves. “Jeeple” are people so connected to Jee that they vie to win “jeels” (points) for donating to the needier humans.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was probably trying to channel Anthony Burgess with the many made-up words.
As for the repetition at the end of the protagonist’s writing effort prior to the feedback section, I was grappling with which of those three phrases sounded the best, and ultimately strung them together to convey the writer’s angst.
Even I’m not sure why the protagonist wanted to buy a new dog collar, beyond experiencing a pang of nostalgia and surrendering to shopaholism. Maybe they have a new dog; maybe not. In reality, I did, much as described, once come across only to throw away a moldy dog collar which had been worn by a beloved deceased Newfie mix named Washington; only I didn’t replace it. In any case, I could go along with the dog collar symbolizing humankind’s enthrallment to AI; evidently Jee sees the relationship that way. Unless it’s an example of Jee’s sense of humor. But then, aren’t truer things are said in jest?
Part of the humor in the Jeeshh section, at least in my mind, is that it exaggerates the sort of unhelpful stuff peers and instructors might offer in fiction workshops. So Jee suggests making Gus the name of the dog. (IRL, two pet dogs on my block are named Gus.) Other Jeeshh comments demonstrate the AI’s overly critical, sarcastic personality and its facility with language; i.e., the suggested title change.
There’re also jokes embedded in places where Jee confidently provides incorrect information. (I’m unsure of its motives, or whether motive is even the issue; a more dystopian reading would be that humankind’s factual knowledge has degraded to such an extent that Jee sweeps up and passes along all sorts of errors.) Anyway, I had guessed the editor would enjoy seeing “Never-Ending Song of Love,” the 1971 hit song by the rock/soul duo Delaney & Bonnie, as (ridiculously) the title of a novel by the eminent science-fiction author and essayist Samuel R. Delany. There’s also an allusion to the “3 Jonathans”: Franzen, Lethem and Foer, leading to the mangling of the title of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel Everything Is Illuminated.
So there you have it. Everything is explicated. Almost.
Glenn Deutsch 