The Ghostwriters

   I have never seen my published work in bookstores yet. 

   I've kept myself informed. I've haunted these bookstores as much as you have.
I keep up. I read everything: various things, stock market reports, classified
ads, and all the obituaries. But no more than I have seen any short blurbs in
memory of Swann or the late Françoise, than I have seen reviews published of any
books with the same name or bearing any resemblance to mine. Should I have any
confidence in the police, the editor, their families, the critics? 

   My editor, of whom I will speak first, doubtlessly expects results. We
promised him a hecatomb, an enormous massacre, but will he start up the presses
to ink the shrouds of two p-pitiful cadavers? A trifle... It's a bit short isn't
it. We have seen more beautiful sheets. The worst detective novel, the least
lampoon brought forth ten times, is ten thousand times its quota (and with a
lower word count too). What is it for you, dear reader, the layers of blood and
cash and thousands of murders and long cries of rage, hellish sobs that overturn
all order -- all vengeance? Nothing! Also, in the meantime, I have not stopped
working conscientiously to satisfy your cruelty. Cottard, dead! Norpois, dead!
Bregotte, dead! Bloch, dead! Madame Verdurin, dead! While you putter around the
garden at dusk, I will be knifing, unflinchingly, new corpses in the shadows.
Science with patience, torment is assured. 

   It could also be that the hired-criminal readers, the page-flippers for whom
each page is finely calibrated, have derided my account as an essay on political
economy, a new-novel of evil conscience, an untimely translation of an outmoded
treatise on logic, a new piece of cyber-erotica... am I correct in this thought? 

   As well, it's not impossible that the editor, abusing the license I have
given him, has rewritten the whole thing from top to bottom, reset my work in
lead type. Thus, I would have become, without even knowing it, not only a vicar,
but also a ghostwriter...

   I have since become suspicious of the most innocent beach romance novels, the
confessions of adultery, the thick educational fictions, the histories of
fortune, slices of life, diagnoses of modern alienation, morality tales, stories
of urban solitude, anatomies of tortured egos and the desertification of space
(social, mental, rural, etc.).

   In the end, I always resign myself to systematically passing through the
revolving doors of railway station bookstores, provisions always restocked with
detective novels... But no, it's all in vain... Always the same story, never
mine. 

   And yet...  What if hiding under their ragged exteriors, traces of my
disfigured thanatography are visible? 

   Consider for a moment, dear reader, the following hypothesis (this is not
megalomania on my part, rest assured, this is only a conjecture): maybe I am,
under a hundred different pseudonyms, the only unique source, the hidden author
of every book regularly published, and a team of ghostwriters work deep into the
night, rewriting to render my work to render it to your consciousness in the
light of day, so you can enjoy it without discomfort or disapproval...