The Fiction of Privacy: Fantasy and the Past

Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a pleasure to be here. But I confess that there seems to have been a misapprehension, and I further confess it seems to be mine. I was under impression from conversations last year in this same venue at this same time that my defined role as one of your guests of honor was to amuse and entertain Farah Mendlesohn and Christine Mains in any way I could and using all means necessary. I admit that Farah and I were not entirely and utterly sober when this was discussed. Accordingly, I rounded up usual suspect jokes and trimmed my beard. Instead, I discovered, alarmingly late in day, that I was to make a speech and, furthermore, that my remarks were expected to be lucid and judicious, to develop a thesis, shape an argument, perplex, and provoke. Oy. Fortunately, as a good Canadian, I am almost always ready to provoke, and I do have a thesis to share with you today. But before I approach my text, I wonder if you'll indulge a small digression. Given rites of spring, well, spring training here in Florida, it seems apt to begin by citing celebrated linguistic philosopher and Hall of Fame catcher Lawrence Peter Berra, more familiarly known by his nom de plume, Yogi. It was Yogi Berra who said to a graduating class he was addressing, If you come to a fork in road, take it. While we parse gnomic, oracular depths of this, let me remind you that it was also Yogi who further reported, speaking of baseball, that of this game is half As a novelist, I feel much same way much of time. Forks in narrative road, and feeling half mental. On other hand, I'll confess that I've just been guilty of a classic unreliable narrator device: those two initial quotes aren't digressions. Indeed, I hope they might be kept in mind throughout these remarks. Here's why. I'm going to contend that our culture as a whole, and our writers of fiction, including many of most deservedly honored in this country and elsewhere, have indeed taken a fork in road, without even adverting to fact. I'm going to argue that there are significant ethical issues emerging from that, and that they have 90% or perhaps half to do with our culture's attitude to privacy and autonomy of a lived life. I'm then going to perform poised arabesques and linguistic flourishes before your astonished eyes and connect this to a defense of fantasy literature as a way of addressing history and avoiding these ethical concerns. Stand by. Is privacy something with ethical value attached to it? Enormous elements of cultural conditioning underlie this question, and so we should at least pause to acknowledge complex history of private life, way in which very idea of a space to be alone, unobserved, has been alien to many cultures, and is still today a dream or an illusion for many. But perhaps fact that it is a dream is revealing. A room of one's own. In Jewish rabbinical law, notion of protection from the unwanted was enshrined to such a degree that not only was it prohibited to look from one's window into home of another, it was prohibited to build a window where someone might fear they could be overlooked in private space. The anxiety that one might be seen was judged worth assuaging by that society. Think about this, if you will. In translation, core passage reads as follows, Even smallest intrusion into private space by unwanted gaze causes damage, because injury caused by seeing cannot be measured. Significantly, this was not a breach that required aggrieved individual's protest and could not even be permitted by that individual. In other words, intrusion upon privacy was an offense against society, how it defined itself. There are dissenting views. So let me bring into picture remarks of Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, who said, You have zero privacy anyway. …

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