WAYS OF WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
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there are different kinds of truth. My friend should have changed the
real names of the people in her book, but she couldn't do it. She was
possessed by a sort of demonic righteousness. "['m writing the truth and
nothing but. These are the true names." People often say when accused
of slanderous gossip, "But it's the truth," as if that were a justification.
The truth is in the heart of the speaker.
Another reason I have trouble writing about myself, aside from what
it entails in regard to other people, has to do with the essential nature
of writing. According to Freud, "Writing is the record of an absent per–
son." This is a condensation of what Socrates said about not writing.
He said, if you have something to say, you ought to be present to answer
questions from your audience, because truth lies only in the practice of
the dialectic, which is a very difficult thing to arrive at, or to experience.
When it happens it is like a sudden flame. In Plato's
Seventh Letter,
he
goes on about the frivolousness that is inevitable in writing, and says
that any man who tries to write the absolute truth, as it is known to
himself, must be insane. There is no better definition of insanity.
Freud's way of restating Socrates's point, "the record of an absent per–
son," is very suggestive.
If
you are absent when you write, you must be
absent to the second power when you write about yourself. It's time for
me to confess that ['m trying to reconcile the idea of presence in one's
writing with the idea of absence, which is what I intend to do, finally,
in talking about how I write about myself. First, I'd like to tell a joke
that touches on this complexity of simultaneous presence and absence:
The king and his court are out hunting elk in the royal forest. A
poacher sees them coming and becomes terrified. He leaps from
behind a bush and cries, "I am not an elk." Immediately, the king
shoots him. One of the courtiers says, "But your majesty, he said,
'I am not an elk.'" The king slaps his forehead and says, "I thought
he said 'I am an elk.'"
Whenever I write anything, my presence and absence are in constant
tension-especially when writing about myself. What makes things
worse for me is that because of this excruciating tension, I always feel
very much out of fashion, since it is now very common for writers to be
more than usually present-even outrageously present-in their writing,
whether or not they are writing about themselves. Some writers don't
know how to be otherwise than fully present. There has never been such
extraordinary directness and candor. The effect is comparable to
pornography, not because of explicit sexual content, but rather because
