Literature is training in doing without oneself. The writer does not write as herself, of herself, or in her own words. The reader hollows herself out in turn, to play host to a host of voices. If she does this, for the most part, fearlessly and with ease, it is because she is, we are really already hollow. *mouth All speech is a speaking as if—as if one were a person. As if these were one’s own thoughts. They are not; our words, our thoughts, these emphatically included, are not our own, just borrowed for a while. We exist, if you like, but only as fictional characters do. At death, we all fall out of character, and into the world. But some perform this interesting operation before death, and that is the origin of literature.

It is not ordinarily the origin of nonfiction, on whose domain I am trespassing today, but then, not knowing its place is literature’s place. If it scales its retaining walls, however, it is not to usurp the standard of the factual, but to plant in its place its own equivocal ensign, the bend sinister of the pretender.