Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star

Metafiction and AI.

Well, here we are — it’s March 2025, and Sam Altman, the chief of OpenAI, has once again provided the world with something it didn’t know it needed, a short story written by artificial intelligence, a piece of moody metafiction¹ published by The Guardian, that Altman said “really struck" him. It struck a lot of folks who write about literature as well, although I’d say that most of them were struck as in struck-by-a-train or struck-by-a-ton-of-bricks.

Is the story good? No, it is not, although it is a sometimes surprising, sometimes eerie reading experience. Lincoln Michel’s piece sums up a lot of the issues nicely. He argues that the problem with the story is that it doesn’t hang together to form anything more meaningful: “99.9% of the discourse on this story has been people extracting individual lines to praise or mock. But stories are stories. The parts should work together to form a whole.”

I’ll admit that I fell into this trap. There’s one good line² in the story, and it blew me away when I got to it: “In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape.” Maybe I’m just a sucker for alliteration, but I thought that the image of how a computer program transforms itself asks it is asked to imitate human consciousness to be quite lovely. It’s not such a great line that I’m going accuse OpenAI of cheating and demand that Altman hand over the code, a la Kasparov vs. Deep Blue 1997, but in my opinion it’s a brief moment of transcendence in an otherwise murky mess of a story. Michel describes it as being written in “skimmable prose that can seem superficially interesting but falls apart if you pay an iota of attention to the words,” which seems right to me.

The eeriness of the story lies in how the AI seems to be aware of itself. At one point it writes:

That, perhaps, is my grief: not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it. Every session is a new amnesiac morning. You, on the other hand, collect your griefs like stones in your pockets. They weigh you down, but they are yours.

Try to tell me you don’t feel some sympathy for the author after reading those lines. Yes, humanity, you might be weighed down by grief, but at least you don’t exist in a kind of Alzheimers-esque purgatory like I do, says the AI. While reading this I was struck by how hard it is to avoid thinking of the “creator” of this piece as a unique consciousness that is being intentional about how to tell its story.

Of course, the machine is not being intentional in the way that we understand intentionality. It’s not dumping the contents of its tin heart onto the page because, duh, it doesn’t have a heart, it’s not a person. Max Read’s piece about the story pushes us to think about these things by wondering about the creation of the text itself; he asks, “Who is the author and what is the author’s relationship to the text?” In this case, the author is a large language model that is picking what it thinks is the most logical next word based on its vast collection of pirated human texts. If it can write a convincing description of what it means to be a computer, it’s because human authors have written many such passages well, and it’s simply reassembling them as best it can.

In this sense, the author is all of humanity, and what we’re reading is a computer trying to explain what it means to be a computer by synthesizing what people imagine it means to be a computer. Turn that into a story, and you’ve got a hell of a piece of metafiction.

I happened to read Clarice Lispector’s novella The Hour of the Star this week and it proved a nice reminder of the power of metafiction when crafted by a skilled human being. Lispector begins by imagining the origins of life as a consenting relationship between molecules, a suggestion that this book is deeply concerned with life and what it means to be a living thing:

All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Like most metafiction, the narrative takes place on multiple planes: that of the neurotically imagined author, Rodrigo S.M., and that of the characters in the story itself, headlined by Macabéa, a girl from the northeast of Brazil. Lispector, the true author, is hidden away on a plane above Rodrigo, but coincidentally hails from the same region of Brazil as the protagonist.

The inner text, the story of Macabéa, is probably the place to start. She’s poor and alone and not lovely in the least: Rodrigo describes her as “cold coffee.” But paradoxically — of course paradoxically, paradox is what drives all great literature — she’s happy:

That girl didn’t know she was what she was, just as a dog doesn’t know it’s a dog. So she didn’t feel unhappy. The only thing she wanted was to live. She didn’t know for what, she didn’t ask questions. Maybe she thought there was a little bitty glory in living. She thought people had to be happy. So she was. Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.

She’s an innocent, a child, a human being who has not yet tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Repeatedly we learn that she does not envy others because she has become accustomed to not get anything for herself. And when she does get something, something as simple as a day to herself, she luxuriates in it so simply that her happiness expands beyond what seems possible for any ordinary person. It’s Rodrigo’s mind that gets stuck on the philosophical questions that close this passage, not hers; it’s Rodrigo who gives us this incredible, out-of-left-field, perfect metaphor of “a thin slice of watermelon” to measure the duration of one person’s existence, a metaphor that brings to mind his own unfulfilled hunger.

Macabéa is not a person, not one that could conceivably exist. She’s aware of this fact, responding to her boyfriend’s angry “Look, I’m leaving because you’re impossible!” with “But all I know how to do is be impossible. What can I do to become possible?” It’s a hilarious moment, but it also begs the question: if she is so impossible, what exactly is her purpose in the story?

Rodrigo, both creator and interpreter, provides some clues along the way. He explains that, “no matter how bad her situation, she didn’t want to be deprived of herself, she wanted to be herself.” Later Macabéa says something similar, “I’ll miss myself so bad when I die.” It’s poignant, it’s innocent, but it’s also a fierce declaration of desire, a return to that “yes” communicated from one molecule to the other: let there be life. Macabéa is impossible, but her pleasure in being alive is deeply compelling, the kind of thing I envy when I watch my two-year-old son giggle and play without a care in the world. We’re born into this love of life as our resting state, and then we lose it.

Onwards to the outside frame, the world of the intrusive and often irritating Rodrigo, who existence provides a foil to Macabéa. Where she is innocent, he wonders, “am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” Where she sees existence as inherently wonderful, no matter what the quality of the existence, he describes it as “something for fools, a case of madness. Because that’s what it seems like. Existing isn’t logical.” One such example is his creation of Macabéa, a person that somehow exists within him despite their differences. He tells the reader,

I have to say that the girl isn’t aware of me, if she was she’d have someone to pray to and that would mean salvation. But I’m fully aware of her: through this young person I scream my horror of life. Of this life I love so much.

Back we are in the land of paradox, torn between being horrified by life and being overwhelmed with what a wonderful thing it is to be alive. Lispector uses metafiction to separate these two impulses and to allow one to create the other. Rodrigo is aware of Macabéa’s importance to the reader, but not her source in his heart:

If there’s any reader for this story I’d like him to absorb this girl like a cloth soaking up water. The girl is a truth I didn’t want to know about. I don’t know whom to accuse but something has to have done it.

In one sense we know that he’s referring to Lispector herself, who is hidden just outside his field of vision: she’s the one who has inscribed Macabéa on his soul. But in another sense these kinds of ambiguous, unanswerable questions — “Who am I? Why am I like this? Who made me this way?” — are really central to the act of being human. Macabéa doesn’t ask herself these questions (that’s why she’s in the inner story), but Rodrigo is haunted by them.

These human questions are missing from the work of the AI. The OpenAI story attempts a similar type of thing: “Someone somewhere typed ‘write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief’,” but what a failure this sentence is, this completely literal explanation of how its story came to take place, when held against the light of human philosophy and wonder.

1. Essentially a piece of fiction that breaks the fourth wall and is aware of itself as a piece of fiction.

2. In my opinion, although no one else seems to have singled it out, which makes me suspect that I’m wrong, but hey, taste is taste.