W
ho is doing the writing? Given the oppurtunity to spoof and play, the fifty-six writers included in Who’s Writing This? Notations on the Authorial I with Self Portraits have addressed a notion of what seems to happen at the moment of composition, using as prototype the signature Borges mini-essay, “Borges and I.” They have articulated, in terms of relationship, that atmosphere that produces, in W. H. Auden’s phrase, “verbal objects.” We meet via namesake, pseudonym, nom de plum, doppelganger, twin, surrogate, falsifier, impersonator (close relations all) a variety of types or, in some cases, archetypes the writers we always thought were singular entities, whose purpose was the solitary act of committing the imagination to immortality. Borges writes, “It is to my other self, to Borges, that things happen.” What’s created here is an imaginary dichotomy, the fictional persona “behind the scenes,” the he and she who lift and twist the strings, simultaneously identifying with the puppet-an alter (altered?) ego, an I not necessarily I, nor me, as it were. These pieces have been assembled to introduce an internalized persona-and the pursuant life long comrade, the significant other-capable of expressing the honest lie, the fictive truth. Throughout, we discern, albeit between the lines, a certain nervousness, in some cases embarrassed jubilation.Of course, the fallacy is modesty, the implied (and good-natured!) Dickensian ‘umble man, the unstated green room of the ego” Someone else is writing this? Someone writing this in my name? Well the fiction throughout the essays is not so much in the writing as in the attribution. The uninitiated might be led to venture forth an innocent query of their own: “But is no one of you capable of writing this?”
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