My Writing Self

As Descartes almost said, existence is a slippery thing.

A trip to the theater will bring that idea sharply into focus. What you think you see on the stage when you see Othello entering Desdemona’s bedroom in the fifth act of Othello are two people, a man and a woman—real people with real Social Security numbers and real home addresses—dressed up to look like two other people, neither one of whom actually exists at all. But what is really happening has nothing to do with any of the above: what is actually afoot is that a playwright dead and gone from the world for a cool four centuries is somehow managing to overcome the natural limits of the possible to speak from the grave directly to the fully-alive people sitting in the audience. That’s a lot of people involved, only some of whom exist. Even that doesn’t sound that complicated, not really! But saying exactly how many people in that complicated equation are real is more daunting a task than it feels like it should be. Here’s a tip: don’t answer too quickly!

The actors exist, but their real identities are completely submerged under the personae of the characters they’ve been hired to play on stage. So they exist in some theoretical, yet fully invisible way. The characters in the play that the audience sees on stage are wholly fictitious: no matter how talented Glenda Jackson may be, she’s still not really King Lear, who, like Othello and Desdemona, is a wholly fictitious character. (Even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a fictitious character, at least in the sense that the real man of Roman antiquity never said any of the lines the Bard put in his mouth. He didn’t even speak English! Ditto Antony and double-ditto Cleopatra.) That leaves the people in the audience and the playwright to consider. Shakespeare is dead. (He died in the spring of 1616, so it’s been a while.) But even if the play in question were to be by a playwright still among the living, that living person is not actually talking to anyone in the audience other than through the magic of his or her art, and is certainly not really present in the room in the way that two people engaged in direct, dialogic conversation have to be. So that leaves the audience. They, obviously, do exist! But it’s only they in this complicated pas-de-six that do so unambiguously and in a way that does not require elaborate explanation. No wonder I always feel so existentially exhausted after an evening at the theater!

What’s true about the theater is also true about the movies and about TV, which is why I find it upsetting when a character on the screen leaves the dramatic context in which he or she was conceived and in which that character solely exists to turn to the audience in the theater and speak directly to them. (Joan says this is a sign of being a crazy person, but I really do feel this way.) When the Kevin Spacey character in House of Cards, for example, turns to face the camera and address the audience watching at home, it’s at best confusing: the guy on the screen speaking to me isn’t the actor divested of his role in the show (since he’s still in costume and on the set, and he’s reciting lines someone else wrote), but he also isn’t the character he’s portraying (because he seems suddenly to exist in the real world that I myself exist in, which makes no sense since only one of us is real). No wonder I feel ontologically aggressed against when that happens—and, yes, I felt that way even when Matthew Broderick does the same thing at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, stepping out of the film but somehow not really into the real world, tells the audience that the movie is over and that they should all go home. (Or do I mean when Ferris Bueller does that?) You see why this is upsetting! At the very least, it’s confusing. But since I am someone who finds it upsetting to be confused, it all comes down to the same thing.

Why I don’t find third-person novels irritating is a good question. They too, after all, feature narrators who aren’t the author (since they live in the fictitious narrative and seem to be on the same existential plane as the people they’re describing, none of whom exists in the real world) but who also aren’t characters in the story (since they are rarely named or identified, and almost never play any sort of actual role in the plot as it unfolds). Maybe it’s precisely because they are such wan personalities, these all-knowing unidentified narrators, that I don’t find them that upsetting. But it’s also true that I generally like first-person novels much better: when Ishmael opens the book by turning to me, the reader, and telling me what to call him, I like him already. He’s not Melville. But he’s also not a voice-of-God narrator who magically seems to know everything about the story the author-who-is-not-him is about to tell. What Ishmael is, is a character in the book, and that is the case even if he seems able to transcend his own context and speak to me personally and directly. For some reason, I can live with that in a great book. And I feel the same way about Huck when he starts right in by telling me that Mark Twain only mostly told the truth about him in Tom Sawyer. And about Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. And, of course, about Scout as well. (Doesn’t everybody forgive Scout her non-existence and welcome her willingness to tell us her story directly as though we somehow actually could encounter each other on the same plane of existence?) So I’m a little inconsistent. What can you do? My favorites among my own stories are also all first-person narratives. But you probably guessed that already!

And now it turns out that the great stage of human folly and promise that is the Internet also features real/unreal players…and to an extent I hadn’t realized until just recently. There was a startling story just the other day in the Times, in fact, about the degree to which “virtual influencers” have become such a staple of digital advertising that it feels unnecessary to waste time wondering if they are people or digitized sales-avatars. (To see the article, written by Tiffany Hsu, click here.) I do realize that neither Betty Crocker nor Aunt Jemima actually existed either…and that they didn’t do so long before anyone could have imagined the Internet. But they were basically drawings on boxes who occasionally appeared in magazines to encourage the purchase of their products, not faux people with whom consumers could conceive actually of having a relationship with, of listening to, or of caring about.

And that brings me to my own avatar-issue. Because, for me personally at least, my writing self—for all it is obviously allied strongly to the real me—has also come, at least to a certain extent, to exist independently. And as June draws to a close and I conclude now my thirteenth year of writing weekly letters to you all, this seems a point worth pondering. (There has been a lot of room for growth too: this week’s is my 465^th letter since the first went out in the fall of 2006, a number that seems unreal even to me.)

To prepare the series of “best hits” among my letters that will appear during the weeks I’ll be in Israel, I’ve been looking through the files and noticing how my writing has evolved over the years…and how I myself also have in the course of all these weekly efforts to speak directly to my readers about issues that seem relevant and interesting. Without planning to do so in advance, I note how I return over and over to certain themes in my writing, trying always to flesh them out slightly more provocatively and to refine more accurately the precise way I feel in their regard. These themes—the nature of heroism, the symbiotic relationship of history and destiny, the relationship of Jewishness to Judaism, the flawed reasonableness of the democratic ideal, the relationship of church and state in America and in Israel, the sanctity of Jerusalem and the great adventure of owning property there, the ultimate compatibility of science and religion, the relentless vulgarity of so much of Western culture, and the specific way I have responded to specific books I’ve read and wished either to recommend or not to recommend to my readers—will be familiar to all. I’d like to think my prose style has evolved over all these years in a positive way. But more interesting, at least to me personally, is noticing how I have somehow evolved a writing voice that feels to me distinct from my preaching voice or my teaching voice, how the weekly commitment to writing these letters has allowed me to evolve an identifiable addition to my collection of other selves, how I have been able intellectually, emotionally, even spiritually, to evolve and to grow through the medium of these weekly letters.

I remember reading somewhere that you should never been pleased when someone you haven’t seen in ages attempts to compliment you by saying that you haven’t changed a bit in all that time. Life is growth! But growth requires a medium, a context, a setting. And you, my faithful readers for all these many years, have provided me with that setting, with that context. And for that I am truly grateful. 

I wrap up, then, this bar-mitzvah year of writing to you all with a simple wish: may God grant that we all have many years to write and to read, to agree and to argue, to allow the written word to function as the specific arena in which the ideas I put forward in these letters are allowed to incubate so that we can all together see where they go, and where we go as well. Whether there really is no noise when a tree falls to earth if there’s no one present to hear it is one of those high-school truths that feels hard to square with the way the physical world appears actually to work. But what I do know to be true, and unequivocally so, is that no written word truly exists without readers to read it, to test it, to respond to it, to react to the invitation to dialogue or to debate embedded in it. And that makes me very grateful to you all for the opportunity you’ve afforded me over all these many years to write and, because of you, to be read as well.