Writer / Ghost

Kimmo Rosenthal has turned from a career in mathematics and teaching to writing. Some of his recent work has appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Fib Review, The Decadent Review, Hinterland, BigCityLit, and Tiny Molecules. He also has a Pushcart Prize nomination.

I am a writer. I am a ghost.

I first read this gnomic utterance more than a decade ago, while reading over the course of many a day the book Inland, by Gerald Murnane. The main action in the first part of the book is best described as consisting of a man sitting alone at a table in a library with a heaviness on his mind, due to the weight of the words not yet written. At one point this man, the narrator, utters the above phrase. There was much that was perplexing about Inland, not just this writer/ghost phrase, yet, as an aspiring writer, I found the book thrillingly strange, and decided that my writing would benefit were I to read all of Murnane’s books.

Having now read them all, I have a better grasp of the ghost reference through the notion of the “implied author.” Murnane frequently draws the distinction between the “implied author” and the “breathing author,” the former knowable only from the text, the latter existing in the so-called real world and largely unknowable to the reader.

Murnane has said that when writing, you become a different person for the time being…there are parts of you you don’t even know about yourself until you sit down and start writing. Were my few friends or acquaintances to read my written work without any attribution, they would never associate the author with the man bearing my name. I am fascinated by the liminal boundary and inherent contradictions between implied and breathing authors.

To better understand Murnane, I recently read the absorbing essay by Merve Emre, wherein she refers to the “technicity” of Murnane’s writing style, and his use of what she calls the perfect continuous conditional tense, which considers the might-have-been. In Murnane’s notion of what he refers to as “true fiction,” the narrator, that is the implied author, reports certain of the contents of his or her mind, yet what the narrator reports may be what did not happen or might have happened or what can never happen.

Nobel laureate Louise Glück’s essays reinforce many of the same themes. She separates the “artist self” from the “real self,” the former being perceptive and trying to acquire a state of grace, whereas the latter struggles to deal with the vicissitudes of the “real world,” which Glück names as “actuality.” When she claims the “I” on the page is a creation, I hear echoes of the implied author. When she says to separate the shallow from the deep, and choose the deep, I might be reading Murnane’s evocations of Proust’s le profound moi. Her proclamation that truth on the page need not have been lived, rather it is all that can be envisioned, conjures the world of the might-have-been.

I have always been fascinated by the famous short story, “Borges and I,” wherein Borges posits a doppelgänger, his writing self. I live, I go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature; and that literature justifies me. Little by little, I yield him ground, the whole terrain….everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

This sundering of self is also in evidence in the opening of Reader’s Block, the first of David Markson’s remarkable quartet of so-called “index card” novels.

Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday.

To me, or to him?

Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday.

Interspersed with such interjections, are lists of fact after fact about writers, artists, musicians, books, paintings, operas, and more - an intellectual life record. In fact, at one point Markson addresses the “ghost Markson”: is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography after all?

Emily Dickinson famously said tell the truth, but tell it slant. Might such a text as the above be referred to as a slantwise autobiography? In Divorcing, by Susan Taubes, the narrator is in fact a ghost, looking back on the life of a deceased woman who very much resembles Taubes. Is she reporting what happened, or did not happen, or might have happened? Does the novel proleptically foreshadow her suicide weeks after its publication? A key point made by Murnane is that not only do we learn from the narrator what might have happened, but also what it is to know that such things may have happened, a subtle but important distinction.

It is natural to consider other arts and contemplate the “implied artist” in contrast to the “breathing artist.” The photography of Francesca Woodman led to my writing an essay in order to better understand why I found it so compelling. Does her work hint at her suicide at the age of twenty-two? She seemingly exposed everything and revealed nothing, her photographs being fraught with contradictions, leading to my essay being titled “La Femme Cachée (Searching for Francesca Woodman).” Interestingly, Woodman referred to her work as “ghost pictures,” while Karl Ove Knausgard wrote that she was occupying her art and dwelling within it.

Echoing the final thoughts of Borges’ narrator, I often find myself asking which of us is writing this page? Is there a yielding of ground to the “ghost,” one who emerges whenever I become the-man-at-my-desk? Perhaps, more than anything else, the writer/ghost might in fact represent my “true” self.

Notes

Gerald Murnane, Last Letter to a Reader, And Other Stories, 2021

Gerald Murnane, Inland, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012

Emmett Stinson, Murnane, Contemporary Australian Writers, The Miegunyah Press, 2023

Merve Emre, The Reclusive Giant of Australian Letters, The New Yorker, July 25, 2022.

Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco, 1995

Jorge Luis Borges, Borges and I in A Personal Anthology , Grove Press, 1967

David Markson, Reader’s Block, Dalkey Archive Press, 1996

Susan Taubes, Divorcing, New York Review of Books, 2020

Kimmo Rosenthal, La Femme Cachée (Searching for Francesca Woodman), The Decadent Review, June, 2023

Karl Ove Knausgård, Welcome To Reality, in In the Land of the Cyclops, Archipelago Books, 2021.