This is the text of the 2026 Stinging Fly lecture, which was delivered by Roisin Kiberd at Pearse Street Library in Dublin on October 15th 2026, hosted by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.
The alternate title to this talk could be ‘I Don’t Know Who I Am Anymore’. I wrote it in the weeks after my second book was published, a period of motion and bewilderment, of travel and lost sleep and of much public speaking, during which I have drifted out of myself, watching reality from a distance as this other entity, my double, speaks in my place.
In the weeks before the launch, I felt this coming. A sense of momentum, itchy and fraught, of speeding towards a situation beyond my control. I watched the calendar fill up, aware that soon I would have something to promote, and to explain, and would need to present a coherent self to the world.
So I reached for that self, my identity, and found that it was no longer there.
*
One Sunday evening in September an email arrived from Sarah, from Tramp Press, about an event I was doing the following week in Cork with Sara Baume. Sarah, the publisher, had attached a poster made with Canva, the design software, with details of the event and pictures of both of us. It was late in the day, and I opened the attachment on my phone. I emailed back to say all good, and that I was looking forward to the event. A minute later an email from Sara Baume arrived. She was disturbed. The picture on the poster showed a stranger’s face. She attached the original photo that this AI copy was derived from. In it, she was looking to the side, not directly at the camera. Her dog, oddly enough, was doing the same. Sarah, the publisher, got back quickly. She was confused. The software, it seemed, had altered our photos without asking first.
Suddenly this email had all my interest. The AI had positioned Sara and her dog to face the camera, even though this meant replacing her face, and her dog’s, with a stranger’s. Whose face had it given her? What if it had made her turn away from the camera? It felt like a plotline from a horror film, like in The Ring, where people afflicted by a seven-day curse have their faces warped in photographs.
I reopened the image, and now my eyes were drawn to the picture of me. I fail to recognise myself in photos at the best of times. Mostly, I hate how I turn out, so I rarely spend long looking at them. But now I stared into the face of Other Roisin, the Ro-bot, who wore my blue embroidered jacket and stood against the palm-printed walls of Tropical Popical, the nail salon on South William Street where we took photos several weeks earlier. Her hair was smooth and unruffled, her skin without texture, as you might expect from an avatar who has never lived in three dimensions, who does not have wind, or rain, or hormonal acne to contend with. I noticed, zooming in, that she had two different eyebrow shapes, one arched, the other a smooth and narrow swoop. The eyes, though, were the most striking: beady and shiny and uniformly blue, without pupils. Glaring with the enthusiastic innocence of someone who has never lived, someone composed of algorithms. My reconstituted shadow; the face of my past gathered up and harvested and remade, inexplicably, inevitably, as my future.
At least, this was what I thought that night, as I stared into my own AI-altered face, and that of Sara Baume, and that of her AI-altered dog. This was the face of my nightmares, the tulpa I had given life to, leaving me a husk in turn. But another part of me thought “Ah yes, here she is, my doppelgänger. I was expecting her to show up sometime around now.”
*
I think every writer has a doppelgänger, and writing itself is an act of doubling. We are told that by writing we can invent ourselves, and in a sense it’s true. But I suspect I’m not alone in finding that I struggle to relate to the end result; that the self made in writing is like a reptile’s shed skin. It retains our shape, the fading patterns of a past identity. But it’s empty, as though waiting to be put on by someone else.
I first became aware of this idea in college, where I was asked to read a condensed history of English literature in chronological order (the canon, I suppose, though I skipped a lot of books, and that concept was already wearing out its welcome). First we studied the testaments of medieval mystics, the writings of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, which are called the earliest autobiographies written in English. They set an impressive standard for what to expect from the form, including accounts of psychedelic visions, arrest for heresy, narrowly avoiding being burned at the stake, visitations by demons and the Virgin Mary, and constant weeping in the name of the Childe Jesu.
These women helped to create a new mode of literary expression, turning away from interpretation of scripture, then limited to priests, and, by definition, men, and towards the personal, the emotional and physical – hence the constant weeping. Kempe dictated her story to a scribe, and it was edited and passed along a chain of monks until excerpts were published in 1501 by the fabulously named Wynkyn de Worde, a pioneer of medieval printing.
By the following term we arrived at the Renaissance, a period when literary self-invention caught on among the rich and powerful. We were urged to read Stephen Greenblatt’s book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, a study of the ways in which poets and playwrights were formed as public figures by literature, and how, in turn, they wrote their new identities into being.
The book argues that literary figures including Shakespeare, Marlowe and the poet Thomas Wyatt, were guided by Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, a manual – one could even say an early self-help book – on courtly behaviour, social advancement and sprezzatura, meaning nonchalance, or ‘effortless grace’. Writing could create an unlikely social mobility; in this era, every man was a work of art, every action and word a paint stroke that might cast him in a flattering or unfavourable light. Fashion favoured power-dressing; collars were ruffled and starched, sleeves ornamented with precious gems. Doublets were slashed and hoses worn high, flashing a lot of leg (this was for the men – the women were mostly covered up, and encouraged to emulate the Virgin Mary).
Image was everything, and this is shown in the portraiture surviving from that time; highly posed images laden with symbolism, as in the most famous example, Holbein’s The Ambassadors. The writer and royal favourite Sir Walter Raleigh was known for wearing shoes studded with diamonds, valued at £6000 (this being in Tudor money). He also owned a solid silver suit of armour, the sword studded with diamonds, rubies and pearls. Ornamental armour, as a concept, speaks to this theme of literary selfhood, as well as to literary ego – a defensive yet flamboyant measure, melted for bullion after its wearer’s downfall and beheading.
This was a golden age for literary beefing. The writers Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey conducted a pamphlet war throughout the 1590s, publishing satire and open letters, including the immortal, withering line “Would you, in likely reason, gesse it were possible for any shame-swolne toad to have the spet-proofe face to out live this disgrace?’ This increasingly vitriolic conflict led to both their works being banned by the Bishop of London, and a ban on all satirical writing. It is referenced in Love’s Labour’s Lost, by Shakespeare, who is himself linked with the War of the Theatres, the Poetomachia, waged by Ben Jonson and his rivals John Maston and Thomas Dekker.
For a time this kind of conflict seemed as essential to literary self-fashioning as it is, in modern times, to launching a rap career; you are only as good as the people you beef with, and a well-selected target is the ticket to success. In Hamlet, Shakespeare even comments on the trend; he has Rosencrantz claim that “There was, for a while, no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.” “Is’t possible?” asks Hamlet, to which Guldenstern replies “O, there has been much throwing about of brains.”
(We’re not so well-fed these days, I’ll add here. Not since Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal had their showdown on the Dick Cavett show, and one of the two ended up being headbutted.)
Even in the late sixteen-hundreds, rumours abounded that these literary beefs were manufactured in order to sell tickets for plays, or pamphlets, or to otherwise boost the profiles of their participants. Clout chasing, one might call it, and while risky, it’s an understandable response to a culture that claimed that ‘all the world’s a stage’.
There’s so much I’ve forgotten from when I was in college – I’m delivering a highly subjective history, here, half-remembered by a student who half-attended lectures. But something else that stuck with me from this era was the way writers put themselves in their work.
Critics often consider Prospero, from The Tempest, to be a stand-in for Shakespeare himself. He’s a scholar and magician, the ‘author’ of phantasmagorical visions, bringing action to a close when ‘our revels now are ended’ and we are ushered from ‘the great globe itself’. Meanwhile in Doctor Faustus, the eponymous doctor in Marlowe’s play makes a deal with the devil in return for absolute power and knowledge. This character winks at a playwright living on the edge, almost certainly gay at a time when this was illegal, and likely to have secretly served as a spy. Marlowe was prone to lavish spending, drinking and fine dining and the occasional, tragically fatal, bar room knife-fight. Like Faustus, he knew that he was giving up a long life, and social approval, in favour of living fast and free.
These meta-textual touches could be said to anticipate postmodernism, the wave of writers who would, centuries later, play with rupturing the divide between reality and fiction. But perhaps that’s too obvious. Perhaps what it reveals, instead, is that from its origins, creating art went hand in hand with creating the self; that the two are inextricably connected; that, as writers, we write, therefore we are. In the end Prospero breaks his staff, and throws his books into the sea, while Faustus is dragged from the stage into Hell. Perhaps, then, there are two ways out of the writing life; you can retire with dignity, or bargain and plead until the clock strikes midnight, when you will be pulled down to eternal damnation.
Elsewhere, in the court of Charles IX, at the Louvre Palace in Paris, another courtier was inventing an entirely different literary form. Michel de Montaigne’s essaies, derived from the French verb essayer, ‘to try’, outline a form of nonfiction which endures to this day. They document thought processes, the writer wrestling with ideas on the page, striving for certainty, and absolute truth, while acknowledging that this is likely impossible. He wrote ‘Que sais-je?’, ‘what do I know?’, and one day this would make me feel free, enough to explore all that I am fascinated by, but do not yet understand, in that same essay form. But Montaigne was not writing in English, and I would only learn about him years later.
Back then, Greenblatt’s book loomed over my time at college, the subject of lectures and essays and discussion, all the while hinting at the dizzying, uncomfortable truth that we students were at this time inventing ourselves; eighteen-year-olds, big fish from our secondary school ponds, thrown into a new city and challenged to prove ourselves with critical thinking; to write essays, and form opinions, and, through this, to locate our adult identities. It was terrifying. It was meant to be the most exciting time of my life, but I was constantly anxious, severely anorexic, timid in seminars and prone to sending in last-minute work late at night.
I see similar traits in students I teach today; I lacked a voice, not because I was denied one, but because I lacked confidence in myself. I searched in vain each night for the ‘right answer’ to the questions we’d be asked in class, downloading papers, skim-reading into the early hours, denying the obvious – that all they wanted from me was a natural response. Instead I wished to erase myself. I did not yet have a doppelgänger; I barely had a self at all.
*
There’s a certain remoteness to writing from centuries ago. For all its strangeness and its unexpected novelty, it can be hard to connect social codes and behaviours from the past to our present era, and imagine real life people acting this way.
But if anything, modernity – which, by my final year in college, we were finally permitted to study – contains more self-fashioning than all of the previous centuries put together. Exponentially more, to mirror the changing means of self-invention, the media in print and on camera; the mediation of the self, and the ways authors respond to this exposure.
Now I was in the age of author photos, the era of Philip K Dick holding a series of cats, and Patricia Highsmith, also in feline company. Of Joan Didion in her maxi dress, leaning against her Corvette Stingray (I knew, instantly, that this image was a benchmark for literary icon-making – no one else has pulled off that look, a unique combination of vaguely worried and effortlessly cool).
This was the age of Truman Capote posed seductively on a sofa, or holding a cigarette, or emerging, pensive and glaring, from a cluster of plants with vast, heart-shaped leaves. Truman Capote closing his eyes, as though wincing at the most exquisite, most writerly migraine. Darkest of all is Truman Capote standing beside the murderer Perry Smith, subject of Capote’s In Cold Blood, with Smith casual, rolling a cigarette, while Capote, in his bow-tie and tweed, stands rapt before him. One is destined for the hangman’s noose. The other is destined to write about it.
But I also found myself drawn to writers who had not so much self-fashioned as self-erased, writers whose long careers doubled as a vanishing act. Chief among them was Samuel Beckett, whose works reduce over the course of his career, with fewer characters, fewer words, leaving more room on the stage for ghosts. I found myself playing Nell in a student production of Endgame, face powdered white, my legs gone numb from sitting for hours inside a metal bin. Hers is a character who gradually fades out, her lines a collection of displaced fragments, lost in memories as she sits, legless in her bin at the back of the stage, going nowhere, eventually dying, as her son Hamm pontificates in his armchair.
In my final year, so close to being flung from the tower into the world, like the ecstatic, falling people on the tarot card, I found an author who became a kind of spiritual home for me. I wrote my final year thesis on The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien’s depiction of a collapsing reality, a reality so flimsy it is two-dimensional, thinly-hewn from cardboard scraps, hinting at existential horror. A reality that is at once rural Ireland, and the blank and unknowable depths of eternity.
The first thing you should know about The Third Policeman is that its narrator can’t remember his own name. But he knows that he’s a student of De Selby, a philosopher, who believes that a human’s atoms can exchange with those of a bicycle, and thus the person becomes part-bicycle, and the bicycle part-human. Identity, here, is inherently unstable. It’s felt as a gently nagging absence that runs in the background to the plot, one disturbance among many.
That Flann was not Flann, but Brian O’Nolan, or O’Nualáin, feels relevant here, because the author led a double life as a civil servant. The number of pseudonyms used by Flann, or O’Nolan, throughout his life has yet to be verified, but it includes Myles Na gCopaleen, his other well-known pen name, along with An Broc (The Badger), Oscar Love, Lir O’Connor and Blazes O’Blather.
Perhaps this was identity crisis as art, as a line of inquiry, spun out over a lifetime in all its panic and euphoria. I remember finishing that thesis, on a book I had first loved as a teenager, and feeling that I had arrived at something I’d return to in years to come. A theme that might follow me, like a doppelgänger, as I ventured out into the world and began to write.
*
I graduated during a recession, during a period of upheaval in the very industry I wanted to become part of. Print media was giving way to online media. Social media, previously the preserve of niche communities and dubious dating apps, was suddenly mainstream, with Facebook rolled out to Ivy League students, then Oxbridge students, then students in general to generate a sense of hype and exclusivity.
Facebook and Twitter were shiny, new and full of optimistic messaging about changing the world, democratising media and bringing people together. It’s funny now to think of social networks advertising themselves as a force for good, but this was what they did, led by fresh-faced men in hoodies, college dropouts, still bearing the nerdish sheen of social maladjustment, faces pale from a diet of instant noodles and all-night hackathons. Youth alone can be an identity. It can offer the veneer of morality, humility too. This was the springtime of the social network, the time when we did not read the terms and conditions.
What has long fascinated me is how Facebook, especially, adopted methods previously used by more creative online niches and simplified them, making it easy for users to create a virtual identity, to map the details of their lives, their birthdates and friendships, their favourite films and songs and books, their consumer behaviours, and, implicitly, in the gaps between the data, their hopes and fears – the kind that would one day help Cambridge Analytica and their ilk to manipulate them.
The Facebook era was preceded by the Blog Era, which itself outlived the MySpace Era. Blogging was about creativity. It still bore traces of the DIY ethos that characterised personal websites from the 90s. You could customise a WordPress template – for many this was their entry into coding – and add pop-ups, wallpaper, flashing GIFs, background music, or a novelty cursor.
Once your site looked the part, you could fill it with posts. You had to have a thing: reviews of music or films or books, political essays, cooking experiments, ‘what I wore’ pictures or street fashion. As a form of media it was at once slower-paced and more demanding, both for the creator and the consumer, who was expected to read and comment, and collect their favourite blogs in an RSS feed.
I had drifted through this world since my final years in school, through MySpace, Bebo, LiveJournal, Craftster and Ravelry. These were the early years of my digital doppelgänger, an online self which, for me, as with many people of my age, went hand in hand with creative writing.
Facebook and Twitter seemed to scan these networks and harvest their simplest, most compulsive features, distilling them down to the scrolling timeline, a vertical feed which seemed to extend back to when we were born, and, in the opposite direction, skyward, off the screen to the point when we would one day depart this world. They had mapped our lifelines in constellations of data. But at the time we did not find this sinister, because it was still fun.
Because I had been myself on the Internet, I eventually found a job being someone else. Something else, rather; I was a social media manager, posting online every day as a brand of cheddar cheese. I worked at an ad agency in London, in a huge multinational office at London Bridge. When I wasn’t writing a calendar of posts, or replying to tweets from teenage cheese-eaters, I’d scroll through the online magazines that the agency had paid subscriptions for.
This was how I came across an article titled ‘The Brand Called You’, already old, dating from 1997. In it, the business writer Tom Peters imagines a climate where every living person is a brand. “To be in business today,” Peters writes, “our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
Aided by the internet, by personal websites and email, that ‘hot new net-app’ (a direct quote), we are afforded a voice and platform like never before, but must respond by managing our identities like a consumer product. “When you’re promoting brand You everything you do – and everything you choose not to do – communicates the value and character of the brand,” says Peters. He ends this article with an exhortation: “Start today. Or else.”
Today I find this piece at once hideous and eerily prescient. But back then I was torn, and troubled. Was this advice worth following, as an aspiring writer? Those creative parts of the Internet, the ones that taught me how to crochet and how to bake bread, and the difference between serif and sans serif fonts – what were those but examples of personal branding? Was it really so crass, so self-interested? Was all of it a performance for capitalism, undertaken in the spirit of competition? Why else did everything come with numbers attached, Likes, replies, retweets, follower counts?
Why, but that we were competing with each other for the love of an omniscient God, or a human with a God View, that thing in the Cloud, at the top of the timeline, that promised to lift us up, to make us into heroes, if only for one day?
We didn’t yet know that our world was a hellscape. It didn’t feel that way, because it was full of art.
*
In the months after I quit the cheese job, I began to feed my doppelgänger again. During my MA at Trinity, I wrote an essay for a class on American Horror, treating the Slenderman as Internet folklore. A friend recommended I send it to Motherboard, Vice’s technology and science website. I did, and it was published several days later. I kept pitching them, then I pitched Vice UK, and had a sudden brush with virality, with a piece about the strange, misogynistic then-phenomenon of the ‘Irish model’.
Very soon, it seemed that I had a thing, a personal brand. I had some followers, though I did not have a reliable source of income. I lived at home, then out, then home again, then out in a series of increasingly dubious Dublin rentals. One was shared with two construction workers who moonlighted as an Oasis cover band. It had a sign on the front door claiming ‘ancient clan rights’ to the land. At night I noticed shadows behind me in the kitchen window, and learned that there had already been several attempts to exorcise a ghost from the property.
My life was messier than ever – if I wasn’t trying to ignore the ghost while boiling the kettle, I was fending off the Shadow Man from sleep paralysis, thanks to my anxiety, or waking up to Oasis fans passed out on ketamine on the living room floor. But online my virtual self was thriving, the internet full of riches, what Patricia Lockwood calls ‘the sapphires of the instant’. I had opinions on everything. I was not sure how real these opinions were – ‘first thought, best thought’ was the way of things back then. Did it matter that my opinions changed with time, after I had posted them? Not when I was so rewarded for my instantaneous emotion.
This period was in ways the making of me as a writer. I was making connections, constantly pitching, always on the lookout for a story. Writing became a meta-layer over reality, a place where I could be what I was not in real life; confident, opinionated, where offline I took days to make up my mind.
But this was if not an outrightly bad education, it was at least an unreliable one. We were under a spell, tailoring our behaviours, our selves, semi-consciously to fit a model designed to maximise profit rather than human connection. When I look back on that time now I wonder how much of it was really me, and how much was that shadow self, the doppelgänger, a Big Tech collaborator, the ideal digital citizen who welcomes surveillance into their very soul.
This, too, was a golden time for beefing. Rather than beheading, or debtor’s prison, the risk was public shaming and cancellation. An oddly brutal time, for all the millennial optimism. Looking back, I wonder if all that certainty, all that power yet untested in offline life, was really training us for a lifetime of futility, for passivity as data subjects, and a lifetime of scrolling, trapped in bullshit jobs.
*
Around this time I became aware of what was called Alt Lit, a small movement of writers attempting to create a genre of writing native to the Internet. It was characterised by a lack of capitalisation and proper grammar, a high-low, magpie eclecticism, a flatness of affect coupled with spontaneous outbursts of emotion, and a collapse of the borders between the work itself and the medium through which it was shared.
Online profiles – at that time, on Twitter and Tumblr – were key to one’s presence in this world, and the progenitor of this movement, the writer Tao Lin, promoted his books with semi-ironic stunts, like plastering the doors of the Gawker offices with Britney Spears stickers, and re-creating Jonathan Franzen’s Time Magazine cover as satire (remember, you’re only as good as the person you’re beefing with).
I remember interviewing Mark Fisher about his ‘Boring Dystopia’ Facebook group. At the end, the interview questions out of the way, we talked more generally about online life. Fisher was excited about what Tao Lin was doing. He likened him to a very online Andy Warhol. It didn’t last – Lin is a different writer now, and Alt Lit collapsed in a frenzy of sexual misconduct accusations – but I think there was something to Fisher’s comparison. It made a case that the ideal online persona is one of blankness, flatness, irony, and tenacious, near maniacal content creation.
Think of Warhol, who responded to an age of television and celebrity by creating an art studio as a ‘Factory’, prioritising the assembly line over the ‘aura’ of his work, which itself addressed the fragmented, self-reproducing nature of fame. With his black polo neck, his pallid face and his even paler hair, the ‘fright wig’ which lightened over the years from a Nordic blonde to icy platinum, Warhol made of himself a set of instantly identifiable attributes that could be reproduced indefinitely – first in Edie Sedgwick, his dark female twin who was later cast out of his court, and then in the actor Alan Midgette, who, issued with the black garb and platinum wig, travelled America posing as Warhol, delivering lectures to university students.
Warhol successfully outsourced himself, and there is something oracular, and disturbing about this when we apply it to our present age, when each time we talk with an AI, we train it to speak and behave a little more like us.
Of course that very online era imploded. Its values and its humour fell out of fashion, giving way to a yet more ironic faction, the Alt Right, who seized the memes, and seemed to take over the very concept of online humour, rendering the left inert by comparison.
It still strikes me as strange how my own departure from this world was also my entry to writing about it in a literary form. In 2016 I fell into a deep depression and ended up in a month-long treatment programme. In my first meeting with a doctor for cognitive behavioural therapy, he told me that I needed to get off social media. It felt ridiculous that this sideshow on a phone screen had consumed my life, but I didn’t disagree. I deactivated, cancelled work commitments, moved home yet again, and began the slow process of reconnecting with reality. Around that same time I began to write the essays that would become my first book.
*
In September of 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made his digital likeness available on the company’s Sora video app. Using the biometric ‘cameo’ tool, he set the privacy settings to ‘Everyone’, unleashing an army of his own Deepfakes. Overnight, Sora filled with videos of Altman shoplifting GPUs from Target, Altman crawling on the ground wearing a cat suit, Altman as a disembodied singing head emerging from a toilet. This struck me as the closest reality has come to the film ‘Being John Malkovich’, where the eponymous actor enters a tunnel into his own head, and emerges in a world where everyone has his face, and speaks only the name ‘Malkovich’.
Altman launched his video app by hosting an orgy of himself, filling the internet with his doppelgängers. It wasn’t always clear whether these videos were meant to mock Altman or valorise him. In fact, they had the curious and enviable power of co-opting even criticism, and converting it into yet more self-promotion. Altman had open-sourced himself, and in the process declared dominance over a new kind of media.
Sora has since shuttered, thanks to its high operating costs, but it offered only one route to the same outcome we are heading towards; the cannibalisation of the online self, in perpetuity, by companies valued in the hundreds of billions. Companies for which we are the product, while they guzzle tens of thousands of gallons of water each day, and damage the planet, and insist to us that they’re inevitable.
It’s fitting that Altman was also an early investor in Nectome, a service that offers a ‘100% fatal’ procedure to upload the mind, and through this attain eternal life. We cannot accuse him of empty talk – this is someone comfortable with the idea of giving oneself, mind, likeness and, perhaps, soul, to his product, artificial intelligence. For him, the benefits outweigh the risks, both physical and spiritual.
For me, while I have opinions on AI, I also get tired just thinking about it. I’ve witnessed too many Silicon Valley hype cycles. I feel that even by warning about AI, about the threat I’m supposed to feel, as a writer, to my own creativity, I might feed into the myths that people who profit from AI, like Altman, like to tell. It suits them to keep us in a state of apocalyptic futility.
But I’ll admit that these are certainly weird times, times in which creativity, and identity, are being thoroughly destabilised. In which the daughter of the late Robin Williams has to publicly plead for people to stop resurrecting her father as AI slop. In which a writer who might not exist won a prominent short story competition. In which there is a thriving cottage industry of ‘AI humanisers’, products designed to make automated writing read like something composed by a human hand.
*
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the baggage of writing. I count having an identity as part of that – alongside the pitching and the sending out, the fifty-page book proposal, the social media posts, the panels, the reviews which we can or cannot ignore (and really by ignoring them, we still give them psychological power). The trying not to compare ourselves to other writers. The trying not to compare ourselves to ourselves, in the past, when an angel seemed to descend and the ideas flowed naturally.
Regularly, I find myself worrying that I’m not a strong enough personality to survive this; that I’m not loud enough, or certain enough, or that I don’t have enough of a ‘personal brand’ to usher my own writing into the universe. My experiences of being published have been, if anything, a lesson in the impermanence of the self; when I read old work, I’m reminded of how much I’ve changed in the time since I wrote it.
But perhaps this isn’t unusual. Perhaps this is a divide that can be traced throughout literature itself, between those writers who build a persona through their work, and those for whom it represents the opposite, a slow act of self-erasure. Two pieces of writing make me think this. The first is TS Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which argues that as writers, we are in conversation with the past, with ‘Tradition’ as a chain of works of art throughout history, altered each time something new is added to it. But in contributing to this chain, we give away our work to be interpreted by our readers. It no longer belongs to us. Eliot makes the case that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
AI often favours that sentence construction – it loves a good negative parallelism – but I find this surrender of self comforting. It frees up the writer to detach and move on, to find a new fixation and write that out of their system, and continue this cycle, hopefully, for the rest of their life.
The other piece of writing that gives me spiritual comfort is ‘Borges and I’, introduced to me by my partner Rob. In just 312 words, Borges, the great writer and philosopher of imaginary beings and realities, contemplates his own slow effacement by ‘the other one, Borges’, his literary double, who is consuming everything he knows and holds dear. His interests, his ‘games with time and infinity’, become fuel for the other self, a name the first Borges, the one speaking, does not relate to when he sees it in print.
This state, it seems, is fated to continue even after his death. I have often wondered if Borges is referencing Eliot’s Tradition when he says:
I readily admit that a few of his pages are worthwhile, but these pages are not my salvation, perhaps because good writing belongs to no one in particular, not even to my other, but rather to language and tradition.
Eliot’s ‘escape’ appears here too, portrayed as a lifelong flight away from the past self, who is created as soon as he is shed. “Thus,” Borges writes, “my life is an escape. I will lose everything, and everything will belong to oblivion, or to the other.” The piece ends in an absolute, ecstatic collapse of the lines between person and literary persona. Borges signs off “I don’t know which of us wrote this.”
I have never heard a recording of Borges reading this piece aloud, nor can I speak Spanish, in which it was originally written, so it’s hard to know the tone in which his words are intended. Does it end on a note of self-surrender, confident that his place in Tradition is assured? Is this a lament, or uncertain whether the rewards are worth the identity crisis? But that mystery is part of the appeal this piece holds, enough to keep me writing, and hoping that coherence will emerge from the body of work, slowly, over time.
For now I can say that I’m more interested in writing about identity than in constructing one of my own. This currently suits me, though perhaps, one day soon, I’ll grow tired of the theme and move on. For now I am happy to see myself as a process, a host body, a medium through which words enter the world.
