The god-like relationship between the author and his text can be interpreted on two levels: the more surface level being that an author can take reality and facts and change them to his liking in order to engage his audience; on a deeper level, it is, as asserted, a completely unfamiliar world created by the author not only to engage the audience, but to manipulate their feelings and create the illusion that they also belong to such a world, however disturbed it may be.
Classical Poets as Gods of Their Own Texts
Firstly, writers through the ages have taken hard historical facts and myths and fictionalizing them as appropriate, creating and eliminating characters at their own will, and are indeed like "playing god". In antiquity, where an oral culture was prevalent and myths were rarely defined, poets like Virgil and Homer took the essence of these stories, the "mythemes", in order to create an epic poem that would last through the ages.
For example, while the story of Aeneas' foundation of Rome was a well-known contemporary tale, to emphasize his message Virgil took the liberty of creating and destroying the character of Dido; while from a structuralist perspective this has no bearing on the story, this twisting of what exists already begins the godlike relationship a writer has with his created world.
Similarly, while Antony, Cleopatra and Macbeth were in fact real people, Shakespeare took their stories and conformed them to Aristotelian tragedy to create a well-structured play that evokes catharsis. Since then, many may even confuse Shakespeare's portrayal of these characters with recorded history, showing the writer's power to effectively define and change reality as he pleases! Thus it is clear that this god like quality has existed since writing has existed, and we as readers cannot escape from it.
Old Concepts, New Worlds
This god-like relationship is taken one step further as writers begin to create new worlds that are seemingly based on existing worlds, but are actually exaggerations and we are simply manipulated to believe that it can be real. A classic example of this is Swift's "Gulliver"s Travels', where reality is mixed with fantasy in order to satirize the vices and follies of humanity.
The narrator describes everything in extreme detail and constantly asserts his veracity, but ultimately we realize that it is Swift playing god and even our trusty narrator is under his control, ultimately revealing to us the chaotic nature of humanity. Similarly, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" is also very similar to reality, but for the fantasy element that Wilde has put in to destroy his character - the god-like presence of allowing whatever happens to happen is definitely felt through foreshadowing and pathetic fallacy - it is this which evokes and manipulates our emotions.
Dystopias in Modern Writing
In more modern texts, the license to create worlds is increased as society encourages freedom of expression, and thus the divine qualities of creation and resolution are more prevalent than ever. For example, a genre of dystopic texts have emerged, all creating alternate societies where the most brutal core of humanity is revealed. In Brave New World, Huxley, like a god, creates new methods by which babies can be born, and emphasizes racial and class distinctions by materializing it in two separate societies, ultimately trying to evoke the awareness of humans as a hostile race if we continue to pursue our obsession with technology.
Similarly, in 1984, there is almost a post-modernist self-referential quality in that not only do we feel a divine presence, with Orwell as the omniscient observer who can create and destroy as he chooses, but within the text there is the omnipresent figure of Big Brother as well as the Ministry of Love, changing history as it pleases, adding a layer of philosophical complexity to the already brutal and restrained world. This self-referential quality of texts allows readers to realize that the world was created by the writer, such as in Sophie's World where unless characters escape from the author's mind they will be destroyed, emphasizing the enormous power a writer has over his texts. Similarly, in The Glass Menagerie, the narrator even states that "This is a memory play, it is not realistic", again underlining the divine role the author has on his world and his readers/audience.
Complotting with New Technology
As modern culture has introduced new technology, writers have also exploited these features to further emphasize their role as the ultimate manipulator, even implicating the audience into the action.
Memento, a film about short term memory loss, ruptures the structure of films we have come to expect by playing scenes in reverse as well as combining black and white with Technicolor, so that by the end of the film the audience has experienced the same situation as the character suffering from memory loss. This effectively allows the audience to empathize with the character, but at the same time the presence of an omniscient being watching over our reaction towards his world can be felt and be rather disconcerting.
The Matrix plays with humanity's obsession with reality by creating a simulacrum of reality and then revealing the inverted concept that machines are in control - the Wachowski brothers' ability to redefine our world and break notions of normality, but still resources can create and invent new concepts, much like God in his creation of the world. The ultimate example of writers as gods creating a new world is the television series Lost.
Not only is a television series about stranded survivors living on a mysterious island that in itself manipulates the audience into feeling as if it is reality, but the Internet has been used by to create websites for the characters who then become seemingly real, as well as newspaper articles discussing the crash as if it happened. This inter-textuality is one step further in the god-like presence of writers.
Conclusion
Therefore, throughout the ages writers have consistently created alternate but believable worlds, where not only do they have a control over the fate of their characters, but also voyeuristically over the audience. It has simply made its presence stronger as technology has developed and it will be interesting to see how much control writers will have over texts, and what licenses they will take, to maintain this divine status in the twenty-first century.
