The Impersonal Reader

A friend once said, everything is personal.

I was watching in “Up in the Air” when I suddenly entered into a semi-conscious exposition on the statement. Perhaps, it has something to do with the main conflict in the story: whether it’s is better to “let go” of someone personally or electronically. I guess the context provided by the movie is lost in the thought, but still, I couldn’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as “impersonal” at all. Is there indeed, a dichotomy between the person and the situation, when we judge?

Then, I jumped into the process of creation, and the critic of what is created. Is it possible that we could judge a creation by itself, by its own merit and let it stand apart from its creator? I had always consciously feared how people who barely know me would actually form an opinion of me based on what they infer on my output. Nobel laureate Ernest Hemmingway panned his critics for applying psychoanalysis (I think it’s termed ‘content-analysis’ now.) on him, implying that based on his work, he is overcompensating.

When we read, we presume that we are entering a “figment of imagination” of the author. His creation is part of his consciousness; writing, after all, is a conscious activity. The question then evolves into: how much of the author is distilled into his work? Or is it even possible, for writers to removed themselves from their work at all? I had read many interviews with writers, and they are often asked, “How much of character is you?” By asking, it is implicit that readers assume that there is a semblance, perhaps varying in extent only, but always there is a semblance between the author and her character.

Often, we either assume that a character is the author, or if not, the author is the character. We attempt to contextualize a character based on what lives their creators led, or we infer of the lives the author leads or led based on the characters they had created.

Is Catherine Earnshaw then, a dilution or an exaggeration of Emile Bronte? Is Elizabeth Bennet then a sublimal self-portrait of Jane Austen? Is Dorian Gray a most handsome Oscar Wilde? Is Holly Gollightly how Truman Capote saw himself as a woman? If this is so, then could Stephen King better off as Richard Bach? The most intriguing question of all is: Do authors suffer from multiple personality?

Even recluse authors like J.D. Salinger and Elizabeth Barret Browning did not escape “content-analysis” Perhaps, the only writer who remained unscathed is Anonymous. There’s the comfort of anonymity, but then, why do we write at all?