On Proust and Talking to Yourself

Abstract

Where do the things we say come from, and who actually says them? In his endlessly fascinating 1979 essay, “Footing,” Erving Goffman suggested that we might do well to break down the commonplace notion of a “speaker” into a number of partials. He labels them “animator,” “author,” and “principal.”An animator is a “sounding box in use,” a “talking machine, a body engaged in acoustic activity, or, if youwill, an individual active in the role of utterance production.”An author is something different, “someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded.” Finally, a principal is the person “whose beliefs have been told . . . who is committed to what the words say”—someone who is willing, in today’s parlance, to own the words. If you find yourself possessed and uttering words coming from elsewhere, then you are an animator without being a principal or an author. If you tell someone what you more or less want to say, and they then write the speech that you later deliver, then they are the author, but you will be the animator and principal (at least partly). If you write and