Authenticity Readers

Even autobiographical novels need them

I’m going to start with a story about a friend of a friend—I’ll call her H. This is from 10-15 years ago, in Istanbul. One night, H went clubbing with friends and ended up going home with a guy she met on the dance floor, having what she later recalled as a pleasant evening. In the morning, she woke to find the man in a state of confusing (to her) abjection, repeatedly saying things like, “I can’t believe someone like you would be spending time with someone like me.” Eventually H said, with some exasperation: “Why wouldn’t I spend time with you?”—and he looked at her incredulously, and it was only then that she realized that he was missing one leg.

I think about this story approximately once a week (every time I fail to notice anything retroactively noticeable-seeming), but rarely mention it—not from any conscious policy, but because at some point it started to feel somehow “pre-2016” and unsuitable for sharing, or even sustained contemplation. And, in fact, when it came to my mind now, as I sat down to write this post, my first instinct was to dismiss it from mind ASAP, and the reason I didn’t is that, having spent some continuous months outside the U.S., I’ve become more conscious of the provisionality of storytelling norms.

It occurred to me to wonder what exactly is pre-2016 about this story. I realize that, for some years now, whenever an anecdote or observation involves acknowledging some demographic “difference” (ability, race, etc.), I feel caught out, and immediately dismiss it. There are a couple of cultural impulses at play here. One is an increased awareness of the personhood of others, which is clearly salutary and conducive to thought, imagination, etc. But another, I think, is a post-Trump U.S.-American sense of “NOW we know what’s sensitive and insensitive, and from now on we can just triage our way through narratable reality,” which is less conducive to thought—in part because it leads to shame, and shame makes it impossible to think anything beyond “OMG so wrong.”

So OK why exactly does that story feel pre-2016 (and/ or non-U.S.)? I think (a) the hierarchy voiced by the man (“I am beneath your consideration because of my disability”) feels less widespread, and less likely for someone to invoke in such an unguarded way; and (b) difference/ disability doesn’t quite work anymore as a punchline. The structure of the anecdote, as I see it, is: the man is (perhaps somewhat bathetically) bemoaning some form of difference; H (a good liberal) is like, “Dude, shut up, what difference”… and then she realizes there is a difference! And this doesn’t seem so funny anymore. I wonder if (a) and (b) are related, and part of what makes it feel less funny now is the increased ability to imagine how one might receive the story if one was missing a leg.

The reason I’m sharing these insights with you is not that they’re so earth-shaking, but that it was a real relief to have them, instead of just thinking “OMG so wrong” and closing up shop. And I think there’s something interesting going on here with humor— because “OMG so wrong” is itself almost a punchline, and (ironically) precludes further analysis. It also precludes the understanding that “wrong” in this case is so dependent on time and place, and will definitely keep changing, and thus requires constant thought—you can’t just learn it once, stop thinking about it, and never feel shame again.

So yeah… shame-protection. This brings me to a realization I made, again around 2016, about my own writing, where I started to notice a tendency to use external markers of “difference” as a shorthand for characterization. It was painful to realize this. Of course it isn’t a tendency I invented, but one I inherited from some of my favorite books. When I talk about nineteenth-century novels having imperialistic norms baked into them (see, e.g., here and here)… this is partly what I’m thinking about: the role of physical/ physicalized difference in novelistic characterization.

I haven’t managed to write anything yet about characterization, because I still have a hard time articulating what exactly I’m questioning. (Thank you, Substackers, for supporting this kind of exploratory endeavor!) Surely, my problem isn’t just that novelistic characters are a synthesis of physical appearance and personality, or that physical appearance stands in for personality when a character is first introduced… because how could these things be otherwise? (Could they be otherwise—in cognition or in novels? Ahhh I am such a dreamer.)

[Fast-forward 20 minutes of thinking about why “the worried-looking child with the accordion” feels less “problematic” than “the Albanian man with a limp.”]

Fast-forward 10 minutes of scrolling through War and Peace (Maude translation) looking for an example of “limping Albanian-type” characterizations.

This is what I found:

The colonel was a stout, tall, plethoric German, evidently devoted to the service and patriotically Russian. He resented Shinshín’s remark. ‘It is for the reasson, my goot sir,’ said he, speaking with a German accent, ‘for the reasson zat ze Emperor knows zat.’¹

When I look at a classic Tolstoy description like that… part of me finds it relaxing, even low-grade delightful. Even without looking up “plethoric,” it’s so easy to picture this guy: physically solid, always slightly offended, pedantically more Russian than the Russians, and the causes of his being that way (anti-German discrimination; a large physique (might lead to stolidity as a coping mechanism)). And yet… I don’t think one would want to describe someone that way now. And I think part of what changed is, Tolstoy wasn’t thinking about actual plethoric Germans reading War and Peace… and now, for a lot of reasons, the default is to put more effort into thinking of more of the characters as potential readers (i.e., as fully existent people).

Adobe Firefly interpretation of “a tall stout plethoric colonel in the Russian Imperial Army around 1806”

I first started thinking about these things in 2020, while I was revising Either/Or (after visiting Ukraine and going down an Edward Said rabbithole). I was thinking a lot about how I was using characterization—whether it was reductive, or upholding anything that I (a) didn’t want to uphold and (b) could potentially not uphold. But it was so hard to think about—it was hard to even hold the concepts in my mind. At some point, I thought my brain might have been deformed by reading so many nineteenth-century books in the 1990s… so I wrote to Penguin Press and asked if they could send my book to a sensitivity reader, ideally someone in their 20s, and get their take on characterization. Penguin was awesome as usual, and made it happen. The term they used was authenticity reader (I think to avoid stigmatizing anyone as “sensitive”), which at first felt weird: why did I need an “authenticity reader” to vet my largely autobiographical novel? But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Directly or indirectly, all writing comes from personal experience, so it makes sense to have a non-you person read your work from the POV of “other people being real” in ways you might not have been thinking about.

I remember when I was about to click on the attachment for the authenticity report, I was filled with terror, like my whole way of being was going to be questioned. But all it was was a list of small changes, some of them useful. (E.g. at some point I had described a character as “Korean,” and the reader suggested to either change to “Asian,” or specify what about the character indicated Koreanness to the narrator.) On the whole, I would classify it as a helpful rather than unhelpful experience. But it did not make me radically rethink novelistic characterization, which I realized was what I had (unrealistically) wanted.

None of which is at all what I meant to write about today! This post was going to be about rereading David Copperfield—specifically, about “discovering” that Copperfield includes a character (Mr. Dick) who has been working for 10+ years on a piece of autobiographical writing without being able to finish it, because of intrusive thoughts that come into his head, from the head of King Charles the First—because apparently, when Charles was beheaded in 1649, all his troubles left his own head and entered Mr. Dick’s.

Given the number of times I believe myself to have read David Copperfield, and the general course of my interest and activities over the past twenty years, I have a hard time understanding how I could have either forgotten or failed to register this representation of an autobiographical writer who is (a) prevented by intrusive interiority of some other person from writing the story of his life, and who (b) appears in Dickens’s own most explicitly autobiographical novel (and whose name is Mr. Dick and whose head is full of the ideas of some kind of Charles—see here for a read of Mr. Dick as a figure for Charles Dickens). And (c) also, if you are a Nabokov person: the idea of someone writing an autobiographical work that keeps getting derailed by the troubled thoughts of a deposed King Charles is literally the plot of Pale Fire. (Why is nobody talking about this!)

But then the thought “How did I not notice Mr. Dick” triggered, in its reflexive way, “H didn’t notice that the man was missing a leg”; and here we are with imperialism and shame.

Not that it doesn’t make sense: David Copperfield is the first Dickens I’m rereading since the Edward Said rabbithole—and Dickens is a key figure in Said’s Culture and Imperialism—and Dickens is famous for characterization, specifically for externalizing/ essentializing character through physique and even name. On this reading, I was also surprised to recognize another technique I had been questioning in my own writing: specifically, the deadpan “reaction shots,” where a character goes on a long crazy super-specific rant, and the narrator (David in this case) has a one-line response (“I did not venture to controvert this opinion”; “I murmured my admiration and approbation”).

I do find this technique funny and therapeutic—as a reader and as a writer. But it does makes me wonder, not for the first time, the extent to which novels are tirade-coping tools for beleaguered past and present children. David manages to survive hundreds of pages of insane and often violent ranting, thanks to the support he derives from his father’s collection of novels (“one of the many passages in Copperfield which are literally true”)… and he grows up to be a novelist. Now he’s the one who gets to be “objective” and generous, to juxtapose and relativize and ironize the different perspectives, to make the ranting people seem crazy and funny.

And I do think there is a case to be made that the bemused-by-ranting subjectivity ends up serving the interests of power. And if you’re looking for colonial expansionist bombast in David Copperfield… Dickens wraps up the Emily plotline and the Micawber plotline by sending everyone on the same boat to Australia, where they will finally be rewarded for all the privations they suffered in England. As they’re about to leave, Mrs. Micawber gives a bonkers speech about how Australia is where Mr. Micawber will finally get everything he’s entitled to, because of his “genius” (so far manifested by racking up debt for himself and others): “This country I am come to conquer! Have you honors? Have you riches? Have you posts of profitable pecuniary emolument? Let them be brought forward. They are mine!” (That’s what she says that Mr. Micawber should be thinking.) At first, Mr. Micawber demurs, especially at the idea that his descendants should eventually amass enough wealth to return to England (“when our race attains to eminence and fortune, I own I should wish that fortune to flow into the coffers of Britannia”)… but the longer Mrs. M goes on, the more convinced Mr. M is, until he stands like a proud figurehead, and it’s funny, kind of?

On the one hand, this is one more crazy rant that David ironizes along with the others… on the other, Mr. Micawber becomes a magistrate in Australia and his race does attain to eminence and fortune. And David loves Mr. Micawber, because Mr. Micawber spoke courteously to him when he was a powerless child—so now David isn’t thinking about how the power dynamics he suffered from in England are going to be replayed overseas.

Which you could call irony (how could this person who is so keen-eyed about this kind of suffering not see that the same thing was happening somewhere else)… except that it’s not really ironic, because inability to see things is a classic after-effect of suffering, as Dickens knew very well. It’s illustrated in Copperfield by the schoolfriend, Tommy Traddles: as adults David is like “Remember that horrible school,” and Traddles is like, “Haha, was it really so bad, didn’t we have good times?” Which was a common response, and that’s how schools like that continued for so long—and Dickens helped change them by bringing it to public awareness. The novel sees what Traddles can’t see anymore. That’s what novels, at their best, can do—and it’s not ironic that they have blind spots, because they’re written by people who have come to see certain things about their own suffering, but, pretty much by definition, still don’t see other things.

So 100 years later, it’s possible to feel impatient and think “The novelist was affirming this structure that led to suffering, even as they were drawing attention to this other kind; what if they were pointing out just enough suffering to make the reader feel good about themselves, while affirming power in all its other ways” (which is a critique I have seen of Dickens). I think my take is… it’s definitely important (and to me exciting) to point out the suffering-inducing structures that are upheld by novels… but it’s not a sign that novels are broken—it’s a sign that this is still a world where novels continue to be useful and where they can continue to get better.

So the important thing is to stay receptive, to use the novel as an instrument to see more, and not to reify it as “I saw this one kind of suffering and now I’m done.” And actually I realized at some point in the middle of this post, there is an amazing story about Dickens doing just that. At the end of 1849 he gets a letter—a sort of unsolicited authenticity read—from a reader/ character in David Copperfield, pointing out some power he has been affirming… and first he feels terrible and ashamed, and then, thanks to serial publication, he’s able to incorporate the critique into the novel.

So that inspirational story is coming up, after the paywall.

Otherwise, today’s post is a case of the story of King Charles’s head being driven out of a story, instead of driving other things out. But I suspect it may come back at a later date, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, thanks for reading!