Editorial: It’s All Phony Anyway

By: Christopher Stokum

When J.D. Salinger died back in January, I couldn't help but feel guilty. Same with David Foster Wallace in '08 and Hunter S. Thompson in '05. It wasn't any latent sense of responsibility for their deaths that brought the guilt, though I suppose if the sense was latent, I wouldn't be aware of having it. It was rather the notion that perhaps I felt a little too badly about their dying, considering my relationship with them. That perhaps, given that they were survived by mothers, fathers, wives, siblings, children, friends, acquaintances, even pets, none of which categories that I was even remotely a member of – that perhaps out of consideration for all of these folks with legitimate claims to sadness, I should get a grip.

But I did fit into a category that obituaries couldn't possibly list the members of in the allotted space. I was a reader. I am a reader, one who cares intensely for those he reads. So much so that I spent the day Salinger died wondering if I had had some sort of bond with him in a past life – also, of course, wondering if there were such things as past lives to have such a bond in. It seemed the only scenario that could explain the weight that had settled uncomfortably in my stomach.

The reader-author relationship is rarely explored. The converse, the author-reader relationship, is standard turf for writing classes and manuals, but the rhetoric here focuses more or less on how to keep the reader's interest, not waste their time, convince them that you're being forthright when you're lying unabashedly out of both ends, etc. Please take a moment and note how remarkably similar the author-reader relationship seems to be to a hell of a lot of romantic relationships. The closest one ever gets to covering real personal connections between authors and their readers is when discussing how to avoid betraying one's reader-directed loathing in one's writing. Again, note how this is pretty much like every relationship you've been in up to this point.

Reader-author relationships are noticeably sweeter. They're characterized by trust, reverence and forgiving, and thus there are few relationships that one can honestly compare them to. When one of your most beloved authors dies, you feel, above all else, betrayed. You feel as if you've lost a confidant, one of your few true comrades, and you feel as if that comrade should have told you that he was planning to leave back when he booked his ticket, not with a postcard from the other side, especially not with one that reads, “You can't visit me; I can't visit you. Do not respond. The mail service here is shit. We may meet up again, depending on who's right about the cosmos.”

How seriously you take all of this betrayal and sadness hinges on readers having relationships with the authors they read that resemble friendships. If they don't, then the situation is more like receiving the above letter from, say, a friend of a friend – essentially, someone you don't know, only know of. To feel badly about their leaving would be strange and presumptuous. It would assume some kind of active communication between the departed and yourself that had never actually taken place. Hence the guilt.

The analogy crumbles, however. There is active communication between the reader and the author. Regardless of the effort that an author puts into his novel, he will never complete it, not until the novel is purchased or found or borrowed or whatever and read. If the author is responsible for laying the groundwork, for selecting the proper materials and arranging them in some comprehensible fashion, then it is the reader who constructs the story. The reader must build the world of the novel mentally; he must give the characters faces and voices, and he must fabricate the scenery. Film, for sake of contrast, doesn't hold the same potential. Actors come with faces (generally); sets are built to look precisely how the director wants them to. While one simply takes in a film and interprets it, one must complete a novel before interpretation even becomes a real option.

Instead of friends, we'll call our favorite authors our co-conspirators. They're the ones who hatch the plans, and we're the ones who carry them out. My depression over Salinger's death didn't stem from an unfulfilled desire to meet the man, nor was it the result of some unhealthy obsession with his work. The latter is almost unimaginable, for his work is, in a sense, my work. No, this is nothing more than the sadness of an crook who has lost one of the few fellow criminals he trusted. Before he completes his next heist, he'll have to find a new thief to get behind.

Or he'll have to find some thieves who will get behind him.