The Hypothetical You

Throughout this venture, you might notice repeat usage of a certain word.  That word is ‘you’.  And while it might come as unpleasant shock, ‘you’ do not exist.

It could be argued that that all writing is nothing more than a transcribed conversation, a dialog between an author and his or her imagined audience.  The key word being imagined.  In order to lend these words meaning, I have to pretend that some someone is, or will, or someday might, actually sit down and read them.  When all along the far more reasonable supposition is that there’s no there there, no you being ‘you’, and I’m engaged in a monolog, not a dialog.  An actor addressing an empty house, wondering at the lack of applause.

As readers, there’s a duty we must often assume.  The suspension of disbelief.  But there’s a much greater leap of faith every author is asked to undertake.  We have to achieve the arrogance, the stupidity, to pretend that anyone really gives a shit about what we have to say.  That the ‘you’ we use is more than a convention, a pretense, but an actual, living human being, somewhere out there in the ether.  Knowing all along it’s most likely a fiction, the one that makes all fiction, all writing, even remotely possible.

So thank you for being there.  Or not being there, as the case may be.  In imagining you, I imagine myself, which is after all what life, what writing, is all about.