Impersonation: Term used by both John Updike and Philip Roth for switching to alternate personalities, which they say is essence of fiction writing process

John Updike

This is how Updike begins an essay is which he discusses a chapter from Either/Or, a book by Kierkegaard: “Søren Kierkegaard’s method…resembles that of a fiction writer: he engages in multiple impersonations…”

Updike then notes that “Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s first major work…a bulky, two-volume collection of papers,” was attributed to “Victor Eremita (‘Victor Hermit’),” which was one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous, alternate personalities, which I listed in a recent post here.

Thus, Updike says that the method of the fiction writer is to “engage in multiple impersonations” in the same sense that Kierkegaard did when he switched to his various pseudonymous, writing personalities, for whose writings Kierkegaard’s ordinary personality refused to take credit (see recent post).

This reminds me of my first post in June 2013 on Charles Dickens, in which I quote his business manager as saying that Dickens would talk to him about the novels almost as if he, Dickens, didn’t write them; and Dickens’s biographer quotes Dickens about his writings as saying that he, Dickens, really does not invent it.

John Updike. More Matter: Essays and Criticism. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 139.

Philip Roth

“…everybody’s split…Everybody is full of cracks and fissures…Hiding them is sometimes taken for…not having them…It’s all the art of impersonation…That’s the fundamental novelistic gift…His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down…Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature…I am somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing” (1).

In The Counterlife, Roth’s alternate personality, Zuckerman, says:

“It’s all impersonation — in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through…What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required…” (2, p. 28).

“If there is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation — the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate” (2, p. 90).

Of course, Roth exaggerates when he says, in effect, that everyone has multiple personality trait, but that many people hide it. This is true of 90% of novelists, but of probably no more than 30% of the general public.

1. Hermione Lee. “Philip Roth: The Art of Fiction” (1984), in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV. New York, Picador, 2009, pp. 203-235.

2. Timothy Parrish (Editor). The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press, 2007.