Who is doing the writing?  Given the opportunity to spoof and play, the fifty-six writers included in Who’s Writing This? Notions 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 immorality. 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 lifelong 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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Reprinted from Who's Writing This? with permission from the publisher, The Ecco Press. Copyright © 1995 by Daniel Halpern. 

It is to my other self, to Borges, that things happen.  I walk about Buenos Aires and I pause, almost mechanically, to contemplate the arch of an entry or the portal of a church; news of Borges comes to me in the mail, and I see his name on a short list of professors or in a biographical dictionary.  I am fond of hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the etymology of words, the tang of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson; the other one shares these enthusiasms, but in a rather vain, theatrical way. It would be an exaggeration to call our relationship hostile.  I live, I agree to go on living, so that Borges may fashion his literature; that literature justifies me.  I do not mind admitting that he has managed to write a few worthwhile pages, but these pages cannot save me, perhaps because good writing belongs to nobody, not even to my other, but rather to language itself, to the tradition.  Beyond that, I am doomed to oblivion, utterly doomed, and no more than certain flashes of my existence can survive in the work of my other.  Little by little I am surrendering everything to him, although I am well aware of his perverse habit of falsifying and exaggerating.  Spinoza understood that everything wishes to continue in its own being:  A stone wishes to be a stone, eternally, a tiger a tiger.   I must go on in Borges, not in myself (if I am anyone at all).  But I recognize myself much less in the books he writes than in many others or in the clumsy plucking of a guitar.  Years ago I tried to cut free from him and went from my myths of suburban life to games with time and infinity; but those games belong to Borges now and I will have to come up with something else.  And so my life leaks away and I lose everything, and everything passes into oblivion, or to my other.

 I cannot tell which one of us is writing this page.

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Reprinted from Who's Writing This? with permission from the publisher, The Ecco Press. Copyright © 1995 by The Ecco Press. Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid.

Why do authors wish to pretend they don’t exist?  It’s a way of skinning out, of avoiding truth and consequences.  They’d like to deny the crime, although their fingerprints are all over the martini glasses, not to mention the hacksaw blade and the victim’s neck.  Amnesia, they plead.  Epilepsy.  Sugar overdose.  Demonic possession.  How convenient to have an authorial twin, living in your body, looking out through your eyes, pushing pen down on paper or key down on keyboard, while you do what?  File your nails?

 It was me, I confess it.  Or, to be more authorial: It was I.

 But please note:  The was is crucial.  By the time you read these words, the I that wrote them will have forgotten what it was, though the it lingers on, haunting the paper, unheard until you happen across it and your energy field activates it, and a voice plays eerily in your  head, like a long-forgotten gramophone.  At the same time a miasmic image rises like a spirit from a bog.  Wavering, indistinct, part fear, part wish-fulfillment, she is me as you conceive me.  You even supply the costumes: gauzy Madonna whites, black leather and whips, brisk little suits, they are all your doing.  I myself own none of these clothes.  A projection, a mass hallucination, a neurological disorder—call her what you will, but don’t confuse her with me.  She had nothing to do with writing this text, this it, which was performed by me, and me alone, with a blue Express ballpoint pen on a Hilary lined notepad—I supply the brand names to convince you—on a boat crossing Lake Erie, this sixth of September, 1993.

 A date which, even as I set it down, assumes the slipperiness, the liquid shine, the alluring phosphorescence of the most devious and lie-inspired fiction.  How can you believe it? How can you believe anything I say?  That’s always the problem, though it’s never hers.  She’s the one you find plausible, she’s the one who takes you in, because she is your creature.

 But I am not.

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Reprinted from Who's Writing This? with permission from the publisher, The Ecco Press. Copyright © 1995 by The Ecco Press.  

At the first sitting, he leans forward in his chair and looks warily at me, but he cannot say what he is wary of.  I write this as a friend, I tell him, and assure him that the people I portray always look handsome, distinguished, and intelligent.

 Stiffened and slightly uncomfortable inside his body, he feels at first that nothing is happening.  IT is like sitting in a dentist’s chair having his jaw X-rayed.  Then, instead of feeling, as with an X ray, that his body has been invisibly penetrated, he observes that, worse, something is being removed from his body, something like its outermost layer of skin, one that he did not realize could be separated from the others.

 It is not a layer of his skin that I am removing, however; it is merely the light that is reflected off the surface of his body.  Nevertheless, he believes that it is his.  He has always owned that light; he needs it to surround the darkness; he wants to keep it.

 He fears that somehow he is being slightly diminished by the experience.  It occurs to him that if he allows it to continue, if he goes on sitting for me over and over again, year after year, he will not merely become invisible, he will literally disappear—he will cease to exist.  The skin of light that surrounds his body will be removes, layer by layer, all the way in to the center, shrinking the darkness inside as it goes, until it is the size of a doll’s darkness, then that of the darkness inside an olive, a drop of red wine, a period at the end of a sentence.

 When the sitting is over and he is able to speak, he quickly declares his name, Russell, as if it were a complete sentence, as if he were using it to claim his table at a restaurant, and his anxiety flies away, like a dream on waking.  I cease writing and put down my pen.  He feels as if nothing has happened. Surely he imagined it, the loss, the theft, the subatomic pilferage.  Perhaps it was a dream of being photographed and was merely symbolic.

 Sometime later, he finds himself seated before me in a chair again, and he recalls of the dream of being photographed only the terrible anticipation of loss that it gave him, and without knowing exactly why, grows wary all over again.  But the darkness inside his body is smaller now than it was before, and he is not as afraid of losing it as he was the first time.

 Perhaps he will smile and look straight into my eyes, and now when I put down my pen, he will not be able to say my name or will remember only its initial letter.

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Reprinted from Who's Writing This? with permission from the publisher, The Ecco Press. Copyright © 1995 by The Ecco Press.