(auto)biography of TRP

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Penny writes:
I can't speak to that, but it is most interesting to me that each of us,
to some extent, seems to have created a TRP in our own image.  Perhaps
that is the gift, or the trap, of TRP's absence from The Scene.
_________________________
Strikes me that there is the vacuum called TRP that we all rush into, but 
also (more importantly) the absence of the explicit author from his own 
creation.  An author can, of course, pop him/herself into the actual 
narrative (e.g., Fowles in the railway carriage at the end of French 
Lieutenant's Woman).  But he/she is also always implicit in our reading of 
the work, especially given a strong public persona.  (Imagine Mailer without 
the public character Norman Mailer.)  Besides satisfying the understandable 
desire for a private life, the completeness of the constructed narrative 
world is all the greater when its creator is invisible.  This is true even 
if, like Bonnie, we don't have a problem imputing personality to an author 
with whom we are not personally acquainted.  The author takes on some of the 
aspects of the god, invisible and omnipresent at the same time...