Lethem has a story in the new Harper’s, “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear,” about a blogger. ‘The Salivating Ear’ is itself an in-joke, the name of a blog I set up a few years ago, entirely so a few friends of mine could amuse one another. It’s out there, vibrating silently in cyberspace, with a handful of dead links and gnomic utterances. The blog’s theoretic proprietor, one ‘C. Tietjens,’ is yet another in-joke, named after the galumphing antihero of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. But it does make me wonder about this impulse, in writing, to mine the text with easter eggs; to load a story or novel with references that might finally be intelligible to one person only. That Summertime Sound, of course, is loaded with such things: so many nods and winks you (or at least, I) might be forgiven for thinking the book’s narrator had–ahem–Tourette’s. Except maybe you won’t notice. These things usually are (almost) invisible to everyone else. Unless it’s Pynchon, say, where the text is so encrusted with them you can’t help but–not just ‘notice,’ but feel like you’re the sober one in a car filled with recklessly stoned and intelligent people. Here, I’m just wondering what those easter eggs do, and how it is that when I’m writing ‘well,’ work that seems intended for an audience of some kind, this creeps into it almost by definition. Perhaps it’s a way of holding on to privacy, of keeping the work encoded in some fashion. It might even be how writing develops personality, manages to be intimate with its reader even if it’s not fully revealing the terms of the joke. Hopefully it’s more than just indulgence. Which is probably what you get when this impulse fails.
Yes!