A beginning

“I’m not as bad as I look,” I smiled warmly at my girlfriend-of-the-week’s perplexed mother in response to her terrified look. She couldn’t take her eyes off mine. Well, not precisely my eyes, she seemed to be more concerned with the eyeliner around my eyes. OK, maybe she could take her eyes off mine, but only to glance at the black spiky hair, then flit to the Starship Enterprise hanging from my ear, then to the chains attaching parts of my clothing to other parts. Always back to the eyeliner. I reveled as she took me in, checked me out, as it were. It was all according to script: the gapes and gasps, the uncomfortable silences. But this was a script, I was performing, in costume. I really meant it when I said that I wasn’t as bad as I looked. I was used to this.

“Then why do you look that way?” I wasn’t used to that. I didn’t have an answer that could back up the warm smile and the charisma I tried to project. I still don’t.

So here I am, writing a new script, writing a story that I hope will help me answer this question. It’s my life, as far as writing can be a life. I’m not trying to be postmodern here, though it might be unavoidable. I am an academic literary critic and I’m acutely aware of the traps of written language. And I’m writing because I just read Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude. In all my critical forays into the ebb and flow of intertextuality, I never thought that intertextuality existed beyond the confines of the text (and I’m not sure that I cared). It’s not just the books that we write that are intersected by the books we read, it’s that our lives are intersected by the stories we absorb, by the stories that we hear, that we digest, and that we use to make sense of things. So an autobiography has to be intertextual, and it has to be literary, it has to be fiction, except that it isn’t. Again, I’m not trying to be postmodern, I know that there is ultimate, absolute truth, I believe in the great narratives. I just believe that sometimes the only way to get to absolute truth is through stories, stories that are simultaneously fiction and not fiction. We don’t have a way to write absolute truth, except that we do. We have a way to write stories in whose reading we are able to encounter absolute truth.

And the truth is, I absolutely do not know why I looked that way. Except maybe I do.